How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State 9780822394273

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How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture

Mary K. Coffey

How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State

Duke University Press  Durham & London  2012

© 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in China by Four Colour Print Group on acid-­f ree paper ♾ Designed by c. h. westmoreland Typeset in arno pro by tseng information systems, inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­ Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. frontispiece: Detail of Juan O’Gorman’s Effective Vote—No Re-election, 1960–61 publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Fund of the College Art Association, and from the Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities at Dartmouth College.

For my parents, first and foremost And last, but not least, for Jon, Elias, Ella, and Irena . . . and in memory of Oli and Angela, who passed too soon

Contents Acknowledgments ix

Introduction  1 1  A Palace for the People  25 2  A Patriotic Sanctuary  78 3  The Womb of the Patria  127 Conclusion  179 Illustration Credits 194 Notes 197 Bibliography 215 Index 227

Acknowledgments As with any project that has taken over ten years to complete, mine requires an extensive list of acknowledgments and thanks. My interest in Mexican art and museum studies began at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, where I earned my master’s and PhD. I am indebted to the teaching and support I received from the entire art history faculty during my eight years of graduate study. My advisor Jonathan Fineberg nurtured my intellectual development, challenged me to improve my writing, and stuck with me as my dissertation topic veered away from his areas of expertise. His mentorship (which combined absolute intellectual and financial support with tough love) allowed me to slowly find my way between disciplines and fields of study. The hybrid nature of this book testifies to the freedom I was given as his advisee. Likewise, I must thank the two other dedicated members of my dissertation committee: Katherine Manthorne and Cameron McCarthy. It was Katherine Manthorne who introduced the study of Latin American art into the curriculum at the University of Illinois. Without her teaching and advising, I would not have pursued this topic. Cameron McCarthy came to the dissertation project late, but was and has remained deeply enthusiastic about my attempts to bring Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality into the realm of cultural studies. In addition to my committee, several other members of the faculty at the U of I were instrumental in my intellectual development. In par-

ticular, I would like to mention Charles Barber and Michael Bérubé; both served at times as unofficial advisors and sounding boards for my work on Mexican art and museology. Likewise, Janet Lyon and James Hay were essential interlocutors throughout my forays into critical theory. Joseph Love, by admitting me into his graduate seminar on historical research methods, introduced me to Latin American historiography and taught me how to conduct primary research. And finally, I want to thank Larry Grossberg, whose approach to cultural studies left an indelible mark on the scholarship of all who passed through the program during his time there, no one more than I. While the intellectual culture developed and sustained by the excellent faculty at the U of I was essential to the development of my work on Mexican muralism and museology, ultimately it was an incredible cohort of fellow graduate students who helped me to solidify my understanding of Foucault and who offered encouragement and solidarity as I cultivated an idiosyncratic pathway between cultural studies and art history. I begin by thanking the many members of the Foucault Reading Group, whose dedication to extracurricular intellectual community remains a highlight of my professional career. In particular, Ted Bailey, Jack Bratich, Samantha King, Jeremy Packer, and Craig Robertson were and continue to be not only life-­long friends, but also scholars whose work I learn from and emulate. Chris Camrath and Melissa Deem were also essential

“partners in crime” during those years. In addition to my cohort in cultural studies, several of my fellow graduate students in the Art History Department were also great supporters along the way. I mention here Debbie Glass, Lorraine Morales Cox, and Mysoon Rizk. Upon my graduation, my dissertation research was significantly reworked into the current manuscript through the generous help and support of my colleagues in the field of Mexican art. First and foremost, I want to thank James Oles, Roberto Tejada, and Adriana Zavala, who remain my “go-­to” resources whenever I am writing or conducting research in the field. The depth and breadth of their collective knowledge and the fun-­ loving nature of their friendship have made the transition from being a “modernist” to a “Mexicanist” possible. Jay’s endless hospitality, local knowledge, and contacts made annual research trips to Mexico not only possible, but also highly productive. Roberto’s beautiful prose reminds me that there are many genres of academic writing. And Adriana’s pioneering work on women and Mexican modernism challenged me to strengthen the gender analysis in my own work. In addition to these three, I would also like to give special thanks to the many scholars who reside in Mexico whose conversation, expertise, and generosity of spirit have profoundly affected my thinking. Cuauhtémoc Medina’s brilliant art criticism is everywhere evident in my argument. Renato González-­Mello’s openness to oblique angles of research provided much needed encouragement as I developed my own approach. And Olivier Debroise’s career-­long investigation into the cultivation and deconstruction of post-­revolutionary cultural nationalism was a guiding inspiration. His untimely death as I was completing this manuscript was both a personal and professional tragedy. I feel the loss to this day. I also want to give credit to Esther Acevedo, Karen Cordero Reiman, Rita Eder, Francisco x   Acknowledgments

Reyes Palma, and Oswaldo Sánchez. This book would not exist without their innovative scholarship and willingness to entertain my ­questions. Stateside, I am grateful to Serge Guillbaut and Ivan Karp, not only for their scholarship on the cultural politics of the Cold War and museum studies, respectively, but also for their willingness to participate in a review of my manuscript. Their critiques of the second draft of my manuscript helped me to re-­frame and better focus the argument. Andrew Hemingway was a great supporter of my early work and our conversations about Mexican art and politics have helped me to clarify my point of view. Similarly, Carol Duncan’s friendship and scholarship on the museum gave me ballast when forging ahead with my study of murals in museums. This book has benefited enormously from the scholarly communities I encountered while employed at Pomona College, New York University, and Dartmouth College. I would like to thank all of my colleagues in the Art and Art History Department at Pomona College for endorsing my work on mural art by offering me my first job and for giving me the opportunity to teach with José Clemente Orozco’s wonderful Prometheus mural. In particular, Frances K. Pohl’s work on socialist artists during the Cold War helped me as I shifted the emphasis in my manuscript from the 1930s to the 1950s and 60s. Judd Emerich’s constant companionship, Italian cuisine, and enthusiasm for theory talk were indispensible during my years in Southern California. Rebecca McGrew and Marjorie Harth aided my work with their friendship and professional acumen in museum work. Finally, while at Pomona College, I had the great fortune to meet and befriend Jacqueline Stevens. Her scholarship on gender and the nation-­state helped me to develop the gender critique of post-­ revolutionary nationalism that now grounds the book.

When I switched coasts and began my Faculty Fellowship at New York University, I joined a brilliant community of engaged intellectuals in the Museum Studies Program, the American Studies Program, the Performance Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Bruce Altshuler and Barbara Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett’s groundbreaking work in the study of museums and exhibition was instrumental to the development of my project. The personal mentorship of Toby Miller and George Yúdice, as well as their tireless efforts to support the study of cultural policy and the “privatization of culture” helped me to cultivate the underdeveloped aspects of my dissertation that would come to frame the arguments in this book and much of my subsequent scholarship. Diana Taylor and Jose Muñoz’s work on the performance of culture helped me to better appreciate the agency of the objects and displays I discuss in this book. Finally, Andrew Ross’s brilliant work on Cold War culture and Arlene Dávila’s critical analysis of the cultural politics of Latinidad both influenced the development of my thinking along the way. In addition to the wealth of intellectual support I received while at nyu, I also want to thank Tatiana Kamorina and Dorothy Rangle for helping me to manage and maximize my research budget so that I could undertake many trips to Mexico to further develop this project. And finally, my work was enhanced by the rich and rewarding relationships I developed with the graduate students I taught in the Museum Studies Program. In particular, I would like to thank Ursula Davila, Mariluz Hoyos, and Sarah Selvidge. This book was completed at Dartmouth College, where I have benefited from an incredibly supportive and collegial department and a broad academic community of scholars doing interdisciplinary work. First and foremost, I want to thank my colleagues in the Art History Department.

Kathleen Corrigan, Ada Cohen, Allen Hockley, Joy Kenseth, Jim Jordan, Adrian Randolph, and Angela Rosenthal nurtured me through the tenure process and supported my vision for a hemispheric Americas curriculum. They provided essential support by reading drafts of my manuscript, helping me to arrange my teaching schedule so as to maximize my research and writing time, and creating a sane and decent work environment. Angela’s unanticipated death during the final stages of procuring the rights to reproduce images has left me in shock. I can only hope that my attempt to integrate her critique of earlier drafts of the manuscript does her scholarly influence justice. My experience in the department has likewise been enhanced by the support and camaraderie of Jane Carroll, Kristin O’Rourke, Marlene Heck, Steve Kangas, Afshan Bokhari, Phoebe Wolfskill, Opher Monsour, and Jeehee Hong. I would also like to thank the department administrator, Betsy Alexander, for helping me to navigate everything from learning how to use a succession of copiers to dealing with the byzantine reimbursement system at the College, as well as the stellar staff in our Visual Resources Center, Elizabeth O’Donnell, Janice Smarsik, and Steven Dyer, who have serviced the project in its many iterations with their excellent digital imaging work. While at Dartmouth, I have also benefited from the generous support of many faculty members outside the Department of Art History. I would like to thank all of my colleagues within the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Program. And, I would like to single out for special thanks, my fellow Mexicanist, Francine A’ness. Her knowledge of Mexican cultural history, willingness to read drafts of chapters, papers, précis, and proposals, as well as our weekly early morning runs and walks were indispensable as I completed Acknowledgments  xi

this project. In addition to those already mentioned, I would also like to thank Mona Domosh and Lisa Baldez who agreed to participate in a review of my manuscript. Rebecca Biron’s scholarship and incisive conversation helped me to work through some of my arguments about gender and Octavio Paz’s criticism. The wonderful staff at the Hood Museum of Art have not only aided my understanding of mural art through their holdings in Mexican art and especially the work of Orozco, but also museum practice through their thoughtful and progressive collecting, programming, and installation design. Finally, my scholarship has been enhanced by the stimulating conversations and challenges posed by an impressive group of junior scholars that I have befriended at Dartmouth. Specifically, I’d like to mention George Edmondson, Laura Edmondson, Jennifer Fluri, Mishuana Goeman, Klaus Mladek, Sharlene Mollett, and Darren Ranco. My acknowledgments would not be complete without delineating the many forms of institutional support I have received while undertaking the research that informs this book. While a graduate student, I received Dissertation Completion funds as well as matching grants from the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Studies. I also enjoyed two Tinker Field Research Grants, as well as a research fellowship from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. At Dartmouth College, I would like to thank the Dickey Center for supporting my research with several travel grants and through their Manuscript Review Program. Likewise, I have benefited from two fellowships—the Class of 1962 Fellowship and the David Bloom and Leslie Chao Fellowship—that enabled me to offset the enormous costs of securing the rights to reproduce the works of art in this book. I received additional support for my research from the deanery in the form of the Karen Wetterhahn Prize as well as xii   Acknowledgments

subvention funds to offset the cost of publication. In Mexico, the Institute for Esthetic Investigation at the unam has also offered critical support through their annual conferences and publications. Apart from these academic institutions, I would be remiss if I did not mention Mr. Lee and the Daily Grind Coffee Shop in Champaign, Illinois. I spent countless hours holed up in a corner of the Grind, reading, taking notes, and eventually writing my dissertation. I would like to thank the incredible staff at Duke University Press for taking on this project and marshalling it through the publication process. The book would still be on my hard drive without the enthusiasm and support of my editor, Valerie Millholland. Special thanks go to her staff, in particular, Miriam Angress, Anil Aktaran, Leigh Barnwell, and Gisela Fosado, for their efforts during the review and publication process. Additionally, Fred Kameny and Sonia Fulop provided essential help in copy editing and formatting. Derek Gottlieb provided rapid service as my indexer. And finally, I wish to express my appreciation to the three anonymous reviewers whose astute reading of the manuscript helped me fix glaring errors, reorganize the chapters, and strengthen the argument throughout. Any remaining errors of fact or argumentation are mine alone. The publication of this book would not have been possible without help and advice from a broad network of scholars in the Mexican field who helped me to locate the appropriate contacts for securing image rights, in addition to the staff at Duke University Press. I would especially like to thank Susan Aberth, Elaine Carey, Luis Castañeda, Jennifer Josten, and Eric Zolov. Likewise, I want to thank Ernesto Leyva and Colleen O’Grady for their research assistance. I would not have been able to complete the manuscript without their help. While none of the chapters in this book have

been published previously, certain aspects of my argument were previewed in various journal articles, anthology essays, and exhibition catalogues. My intervention into Marxian approaches to theorizing the relationship between art, institutions, and popular audiences has been worked out in a series of essays with slightly different foci and scholarly audiences: “Representation, Institutionalization, and the State: Marxist and Post-­ structural Approaches to Mexican Muralism and the Popular,” As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, ed. Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie, and John Roberts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 67–101; “Mural Art and Popular Reception: The Public Institution and Cultural Politics in Post-­ revolutionary Mexico,” La Imagen Política, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2006), 355–84; and “Muralism and the People: Culture, Popular Citizenship, and Government in Post-­revolutionary Mexico,” Communication Review 5 (2002), 1–32. My arguments about the governmental nature of the national culture project have likewise appeared in two essays that have both been revised and re-­anthologized: “What Puts the Culture in Multiculturalism? An Analysis of Culture, Government, and Mexican Identity,” Multicultural Curriculums, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Ram Mahalingam (London: Routledge, 2000), 37–55, reanthologized in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, vol 2, ed. Greg Dimitriadis, Cameron McCarthy, and Warren Crichlow (London: Routledge, 2005), 610–22; and “‘The Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Post-­revolutionary Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” Cultural Studies: A Research Annual 5 (2000): 147–89, anthologized in The Social and the Real: Political Art in the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana Linden, and Jonathan Wein-

berg (State College: Penn State University Press, 2006), 43–70. A small part of my discussion of the Palace of Fine Arts appeared in separate essays on José Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo: “Angels and Prostitutes: José Clemente Orozco’s Catharsis and the Politics of Female Allegory in 1930s Mexico,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (2004), 1–33; “‘Without Any of the Seductions of Art’: On Orozco’s Misogyny and Public Art in the Americas,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 25, no. 83 (2003), 99–119; and “‘I’m not the Fourth Great One’: Rufino Tamayo and Mexican Muralism,” Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, ed. Diana du Pont (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 247–67. Finally, I have several personal thanks to offer to the various members of my family, whose love and support over the years gave me the confidence to pursue my professional goals and write this book. First, my parents, George and Brenda, gave me every advantage in life and asked only that I be passionate about something and pursue it with integrity in return. I was blessed to grow up with three siblings—Angela, Andrew, and Geoff—whose unique personalities and unconditional love have always been a source of safety and strength. I would also like to acknowledge their families—Gary, Liam, and Claire, and Mamie, Isabel, and Sophia—for expanding that love ten-­ fold. In addition to my immediates, I have also benefited from the love and support of two other special families. I would like to thank the Palms, Mike, Nancy, Joan, and Doc, for their intelligence and good humor and for such practical things as taking care of my car or cat while I was away on long research trips. Mike, in particular, provided free proofreading for years and sat patiently listening to and commenting on dry-­runs of the many public talks related to this research that I’ve given along the way. In recent years the Zinmans, Richard, Beth, Greg, and Lauren, have welcomed Acknowledgments  xiii

me into their family and followed the completion of this book with great enthusiasm. Our conversations about everything from political theory or handmade film to foodie-­destinations and family lore have given me hours of pleasure. Finally, my deepest gratitude is for my incredible husband, Jon; my two amazing stepchildren Elias and Ella; and our mutual child, Irena. Jon’s support as a

xiv   Acknowledgments

friend, life partner, and colleague has brought a joy and sense of balance to my life that is unquantifiable. The day-­in and day-­out activity of our busy household, coupled with the love and accomplishments of our children, have helped to keep the at turns agonizing and thrilling process of finalizing a book in perspective.

Introduction The young revolutionary state had need of a sort of legitimization or cultural consecration, and what better consecration than mural painting? That was the way in which a mistake began which ended with the perversion of Mexican mural painting: on the one hand, it was a revolutionary art, or one that called itself revolutionary; on the other, it was an official art.  Octavio Paz Octavio Paz’s observation about the oxymoronic status of Mexican mural painting pinpoints the central paradox at the heart of this book: how a revolutionary art—or at least one that intended to be revolutionary—became an official art that helped to legitimize an authoritarian state. For some, Paz’s words may come as a surprise, as Mexican muralism represents, arguably, the most important example of art on the Left in the history of modern art.1 Since 1921, when José Vasconcelos, Álvaro Obregón’s minister of public education, first invited artists to paint monumental works on public walls, Mexican muralism has been admired by Marxist scholars and progressive intellectuals for its commitment to popular struggle, social justice, and radical politics. Commentators ranging from contemporary chroniclers like Jean Charlot, Anita Brenner, and Bertram Wolfe to subsequent historians like Laurence Hurlburt, Desmond Rochfort, and Raquel Tibol have credited the Mexican mural renaissance with converting the violent energies unleashed by the revolution into an ethical impulse to “socialize artistic expression”2 and to place art in the service of building a new, more equitable society.3

And yet, as Paz’s remarks reveal, a less heroic view exists. Penned in 1978, ten years after the state massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco revealed the limits of democracy within the so-­called institutionalized revolution, Paz’s self-­ interview crystallized decades of his own—and others’—skepticism about the politics of mural art and its dominant idiom, social realism. From this post-­1968 vantage, mural art is neither revolutionary nor populist but rather a cultural technique in the formation of the postrevolutionary state and its authoritarian ruling party (the Party of the Institutional Revolution, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional [pri]). In the chapters that follow, I chronicle Paz’s implication in the very thing he critiques. Nonetheless, his voice, while certainly not disinterested, is essential to the story of postrevolutionary national culture. For that reason, excerpts from his most famous critical essays provide guiding epigraphs for each chapter. The critical perspective that Paz helped to crystallize first emerged in the 1930s when leftist artists attacked Diego Rivera for accepting commissions from capitalist patrons and a federal gov-

ernment they deemed counterrevolutionary. At the heart of this political debate were urgent questions about the relationship between radical art and official institutions. That is, could art painted in government ministries, federal museums, corporate hotels, and the like, politicize its viewer? Or would the ideological significations of the institution (political authoritarianism, bourgeois liberalism, anti-­socialist capitalism, etc.) overdetermine the reception of said work of art? This early critique also posed a set of related questions about the efficacy of Rivera’s style of realism for communicating with the popular audiences mural artists hoped to reach. At the heart of this aesthetic debate were crucial questions regarding the relationship between formal means (media, composition, style, etc.) and the forms of consciousness and behavior the artist hoped to instill in and elicit from the viewer. That is, do certain visual idioms lend themselves to passive contemplation and thus to political conformity? Or can an artist, through innovative formal means, activate the viewing subject and thereby fulfill mural art’s utopian claim to be a weapon for social change? Over the next three decades these aesthetic and political concerns would converge again and again in debates over how (or whether) murals engage the institutions they occupy. In this book I explore the political and aesthetic questions raised by the institutionalization of Mexican muralism. To do so, I focus on a particular instance of institutionalization, the incorporation of murals into a burgeoning complex of state-­funded and managed public museums. Through a sequence of case studies, I track the slow process by which murals entered the museum and the effects of this project—what I call the museum effect—on muralism. Likewise, I illuminate the influence of mural art, as a specific aesthetic practice, on the development of museum science in Mexico. I show how the visual 2   Introduction

and spatial properties of mural art informed and intervened in the evolution of “didactic exhibition,” a distinctive variant of modern museology pioneered in Mexico but admired by practitioners throughout the Western world. My focus on the museum as a privileged site of institutionalization is neither arbitrary nor absolute but rather motivated by historical and theoretical concerns. Chroniclers of the public museum have demonstrated that museums play a constitutive role in state formation and political projects to define citizenship as well as civil projects wherein consensus about community and culture is both created and contested.4 As in most Western democracies—with the United States being the major exception—the museum complex in postrevolutionary Mexico is federally funded and managed. Thus, conceived of as an apparatus of social governance, the museum provides an ideal locus for discerning the political logic of the state at any given moment in time. However, as other scholars have insisted, the museum can also be conceived of as an apparatus of civil society wherein different constituencies engage in the struggle over identity.5 While these scholars most often refer to the re-­conceptualization of museums and their public(s) in the wake of civil rights movements, the federal defunding of the arts in the 1990s, and the economic pressures of global tourism, their insight into the inherently dynamic nature of museum work is helpful when one is considering the role of artists in what Neil Harris has described as the “authoritarian experimentalism” of museum science in the first half of the twentieth century.6 For Harris, authoritarian experimentalism marks the period roughly from the 1920s and 1930s through the 1960s when museum founders and curators attempted to innovate display strategies to improve the museum’s pedagogic function and reach broader class constituencies. This essentially

paternalistic but nonetheless populist expansion of the museum’s compass accounts for the founding of novel types of museums like the Museum of Modern Art (1929) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1930). It also characterizes the innovative experiments in collecting, exhibition design, organization, and education undertaken at these institutions, among others. Consider, for example, the modern installation styles pioneered at MoMA or Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s role in shaping and codifying its collection.7 Or think of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s and Juliana Force’s attempts to bring the principles of domestic interior design to bear on exhibition space to combat the intimidating austerity of institutions of high culture.8 Or, finally, we can recall John Cotton Dana’s slightly earlier endeavors at the Newark Museum to bring blue-­collar workers under the purview of museum education.9 The expansion of museums in postrevolutionary Mexico is therefore not unique but rather typical of this phase of museum building and exhibition planning in North America. What distinguishes Mexico, however, is the role of murals in the elaboration of a modern museum science. Only in Mexico did modern artists play such a sustained and vital role in the shaping of effective exhibition design. Avant-­garde artists in the United States and Europe have historically critiqued prevailing exhibition norms and institutions through Salons des Refusés and anarchic group shows like the 1920 Dada exhibition in Cologne, Germany.10 Likewise, they have intervened in viewing environments, as Duchamp did in Mile of String (1942), and created innovative installations such as Frederick Kiesler’s experiments in sound, lighting, and display at the Art of This Century Gallery. However, in each case the artistic intention was to critique prevailing values or to radicalize exhibition. In Mexico, mural artists engaged museum practice in order to expand the scope of a revo-

lutionary art and to participate in, and perhaps shape, the building of a new social and political order. That their practice inadvertently informed an overtly propagandistic style of exhibition— didactic exhibition—was part of the “mistake” to which Paz refers in the epigraph. The dual implications of Harris’s notion—the museum as an agent of authoritarianism and experimental practice—remind us that despite the museum’s links to political power and class privilege, it is not a monolithic entity through which the singular voice of authority speaks. Rather it is a “contact zone” wherein various interests collide.11 The job of the historian is to reconstitute the divergent voices, historical contingencies, and radical possibilities that are lost when exhibition planning solidifies into the authoritative statements that the public eventually encounters. My focus on the museum as a specific instance of institutionalization, with this dual conception of the museum in mind, allows for a consideration of the relative success or failure of mural art as a political and cultural project without lapsing into generalizing and normative claims about their role in state formation.

“¡Viva México! End of Story”: What Is Official Culture? Before considering questions of success and failure, we need to clarify what is meant when critics argue that mural art’s failure lies in its transformation from a revolutionary art to an “official art.” For Paz, “official art” is synonymous with state propaganda. The artists’ desire for federal patronage was their fatal “mistake.”12 Thus artistic collusion with what he calls a “philanthropic ogre” ultimately “petrified” mural art into a “rhetoric of revolutionary commonplaces.”13 For Shifra Goldman it is the bourgeois class interest of the ruling Introduction  3

elite that “discountenanced the militant and revolutionary aspects of muralism and retained only the superficial, sentimental, and nostalgic,” aided by a “growling torrent of tourists” in search of “local color.”14 According to her, it was not the artist’s aberrant desire for patronage but rather the patron’s deviant bid for foreign capital that lead to what she calls a stylistic “monopoly” among the ranks of mural artists. Paz’s and Goldman’s arguments reflect conventional assumptions about how power and capitalism distorted the popular nationalism inspired by the revolution. For Paz, postrevolutionary politicians transformed the artistic search for an authentic national expression—the “revolutionary” project undertaken by mural artists—into a consecrating ideology for a corrupt state. For Goldman, the national popular was depoliticized and commodified when the ruling elite abandoned social justice for capital accumulation. Both distinguish between a true nationalism, which emanates in Paz’s account from an immanent cultural will and in Goldman’s from a leftist politics, and a false nationalism, conceived as an instrument of the state or market. Neither can countenance that the popular nationalism they deem authentic might itself be implicated in the elaboration of an official culture. Moreover, Paz’s and Goldman’s descriptions of cultural becoming are too overdetermined and unidirectional to account for the multidimensional process through which certain cultural forms become official, on the one hand, or the ways people experience said culture, on the other. I prefer Roger Bartra’s more nuanced account of what he calls cultura oficial (henceforth translated as “official culture”).15 Like Paz and Goldman, Bartra acknowledges that “official culture” refers to both the “ensemble of habits and values that mark the behavior of the Mexican political and bureaucratic class” and the art and literature to which “those very same government offices 4   Introduction

issue a seal of approval . . . in order to restructure it according to established canons.”16 And like the authors cited previously, Bartra acknowledges that “cultural processes have a legitimating, homogenizing, and unifying effect.”17 However, he insists that this is “not because they are mere ‘instruments’ of the ruling class” or “simply an ideological formation created by the Mexican state to trick a dominated population.”18 For Bartra, official culture is first and foremost an effect of the “creation of an ensemble of myths about Mexican identity.”19 It is nationalism, he claims, “that establishes a structural relationship between the nature of culture and the peculiarities of the state.”20 And for Bartra, nationalism is neither an authentic culture emanating from below nor an “invented tradition” orchestrated from above. Rather it is something in between, what he describes as cultural “sediment” that is socially sifted over time from many sources, high and low, and through everyday practices as well as official projects. That is, nationalism is as much a social phenomenon as a cultural or political one. He elaborates: In our country the official expressions of nationalism tell us: If you are Mexican, you must vote for the institutionalized revolution. Those who do not either are traitors to their deepest essence or are not Mexican. Nationalism is, then, an ideology that disguises itself with culture to hide its intimate means of domination. But for this identification of politics with culture to be successful, a process of sedimentation must have taken place already, separating elements socially held to be national from those that are not specifically held to be so. This is a complex process that cannot be produced artificially. That is to say, neither the state nor the ruling class can direct this process from above. This is a global process shaped by the interplay of several factors, including the very formation of the national state.21

Bartra suggests that we distinguish between national identity, political culture, and official cultural policy rather than conflate the three and subsume this conflation under the sign of class domination or state control. “The relationship between these three,” he writes, “is a matter of the ties between the formation of a myth (identity), its insertion into institutional life (political culture), and the ideology that attempts to explain and direct the process (official culture).”22 Bartra’s description of the social and political forces that shape official culture is difficult to grasp. To illustrate the “intimate means of domination” that Bartra ascribes to nationalism as the articulator of popular beliefs, institutional practices, and political ideologies, I turn to the artist José Luis Cuevas’s parable “The Cactus Curtain” (1959). In this seething satire of the “conformist rut” plaguing Mexican art, Cuevas follows the fate of Juan, a young artist who can find no support for his work until he begins to parrot the formal and iconographic clichés of mural art and demand “walls to decorate for the Mexican people!”23 Juan’s professional epiphany takes place at the Palace of Fine Arts when an “abbot-­like functionary” asks whether he “belongs to the Mexican School.”24 Realizing that his professional success depends upon his confession of his allegiance, Juan renounces his “bourgeois” drawings and over time “retreat[s] once and for all behind the cactus curtain. ¡Viva México! End of story.”25 Juan’s acquiescence to political culture (the “abbot-­like functionary” at the Palace of Fine Arts) is signaled by more than his aesthetic reversion to the “simplified forms” and “automatic method of drawing” (a reference to Adolfo Best Maugard’s Method of Drawing and its profound influence on the Mexican school) he had been taught at art school.26 He must also perform his nationalism in café conversations and through bodily comportment. He begins to wear overalls and huaraches and has his wife dress as a Tehuana.

He grows a big mustache like Zapata, declares tequila “the best drink in the whole world,” and insists that “the universe ought to eat enchiladas.”27 For Juan, becoming a purveyor of official culture is not simply a pragmatic decision; it also taps into deep affective structures of belonging. After all, Cuevas, like his proxy Juan, admits that he wants “to be appreciated in [his] own country.”28 Juan’s nationalist performance may be cynical, but its repertoire derives from sources beyond the mere purview of the postrevolutionary state or ruling elite. Cuevas makes explicit the ties between nationalism, political culture, and official culture. However, he also hints at the limits of official culture by noting that Juan’s working-­class parents, relatives, and neighbors have never seen a mural: “or if they have, they have agreed with the janitor of the building that it is terrible.”29 These “plumbers” and “bribe-­takers” prefer posters of Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante (popular film stars during the golden age of Mexican cinema), artificial flowers, and the blonde pinups in Coca-­ Cola advertisements. “At home there was never any mention of the artists who are supposed to be the apostles of the people,” he writes. “The talk was about the latest amorous adventures of Maria Félix.”30 These commercial products make up a compendium of the forms of popular culture deemed degraded, inauthentic, and foreign by proselytizers of official culture. However unrefined these tastes may be, they do not lack national affect. Rather they reflect what Bartra calls the amalgam of “‘true’ popular culture” and “transnationalizing . . . mass media” that characterizes Mexican modernity.31 By detailing the many forms of Mexican culture that Juan negotiates in his daily life, Cuevas limns a portrait of official culture that reveals not only its powerful effects but also its tensions, paradoxes, and limits. Bartra and Cuevas therefore help us to better Introduction  5

grasp what it means to call mural art an “official art.” As a key site for channeling the energies and affects of popular sectors and struggles into a codified expression of Mexicanness, murals were essential to the “formation of a myth (identity)” even before they were systematically inserted into institutional life or consolidated through an official ideology. Social realism—or the Mexican school of painting—helped to articulate cultural sediment—Zapata’s agrarianism; enchiladas and tequila; indigenous, proletarian, and peasant modes of dress—to a leftist politics in the service of building a new postrevolutionary state and society. With Bartra’s formulation of official culture as my guide, I turn now to a discussion of postrevolutionary mestizaje in order to illustrate both the convergence and divergence between state actors, mural artists, and their critics on this essential trope of national identity. In this way we can better understand what Bartra means when he argues that it is the “creation of an ensemble of myths about Mexican identity . . . that establishes a structural relationship between the nature of culture and the peculiarities of the state.”32

Mestizaje: Mural Art and the “Formation of a Myth (Identity)” As many scholars have demonstrated, postrevolutionary nationalism was predicated upon the racial trope of the mestizo. While ostensibly a positive reconfiguration of Mexico’s racial and cultural hybridity, mestizaje, as conceived by intellectuals, constitutes instead an idealized, essentially assimilative mixture of the Spanish/ Creole, configured as white and European, and the indigenous, understood as its racial and civilizational antipode. José Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic Race (1925) is the emblematic text on postrevo6   Introduction

lutionary mestizaje, for it makes self-­evident the connection between the management of biological reproduction and the cultural elaboration of a new national imaginary. In his treatise, Vasconcelos elevates racial miscegenation to a transcendent eugenic principle. He argues that a “mixture of races accomplished through the laws of social well-­being, sympathy, and beauty” will lead to a cosmic race “infinitely superior to all that have previously existed.”33 By changing racial impurity from a sign of shame into one of pride, Vasconcelos attacks the popular notion, promoted by social scientists, that miscegenated populations are biologically inferior to racially pure societies. Thus he concludes his tract with an emphatic and shocking—given the racial discourse of the period—prophesy: “We in America shall arrive, before any other part of the world, at the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of the previous ones.”34 Yet despite his celebration of mestizaje, Vasconcelos laments the “race problem” in Mexico, stating, “Whether we like it or not the Mestizo is the dominant element of the Latin American continent.”35 Vasconcelos reasons that Indian blood is to blame for the mestizo’s lack of “moral strength,” for as a “lower breed” that “reproduces madly,” the Indian languishes in a state of degradation.36 As the natal “element” and différence around which a new mestizo identity could be elaborated, the living and breathing Indian remains recalcitrant, a perennial sign of Mexico’s lack. Thus Vasconcelos conceives of an “aesthetic eugenics” that might properly direct not only future miscegenation but also the integration of indigenous art into a new national culture, predicated on the mestizo ideal. Just as education could redeem Mexico’s popular classes, a public art that combined classicism with folk motifs could redeem Mexico’s indigenous traditions and effect an “aesthetic eugenics” in its viewing public. Therefore, Vasconce-

los commissioned Mexican artists to paint large murals on public buildings, thus inaugurating the Mexican mural renaissance. To infuse these artists with a sense of their own cultural roots, Vasconcelos sent them on envoys to Mexico’s pre-­ Columbian monuments and centers of regional craft production. Describing his intention, he writes, “I had recommended popular art as a basis from which to go on to the classics, without crossing over into mediocrity.”37 By this he meant that artists should take inspiration from indigenous art forms both past and present but trans-­value their example in a new classicism rather than emulate them by becoming “neo-­primitives.” For Vasconcelos, classical art remained the epitome of beautiful and sublime artistic expression. He envisioned murals based on literary themes with symbolic and allegorical representations of virtues and theorized that the mere presence of this material in public space would enlighten and thereby lift up the populace. This mestizo culture would solve the “Mexican problem.” Just as artists would incorporate elements of “authentic” indigenous expression into neoclassical allegories of cultural enlightenment, so too would the government, through its educational initiatives—muralism included—assimilate indigenous peoples into an enlightened, modern, and mestizo body politic. As a normative figuration of the social, mestizaje promised to modernize its indigenous component while simultaneously authenticating its contemporaneity via a cultured lineage rooted in tradition and a deep past. The artists charged with this task never embraced Vasconcelos’s views on biological or aesthetic eugenics. And their murals should not be perceived as mere reflections of Vasconcelian mestizaje. In their art, Vasconcelos’s emphasis on spiritual transcendence gave way to a more materialist concern for the political and economic

transformation of Mexican society. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the artists eschewed the governmental designs of their federal patrons, or that they rejected mestizaje as the ruling trope for a new postrevolutionary national identity. Rather, their radical indigenismo and elaboration of different conceptions of mestizaje represent a strategy for legitimating an alternative vision of modernizing nationalism and national modernism. Two iconic murals from the early years of the movement demonstrate this point.

Orozco’s Ambivalent Mestizaje In José Clemente Orozco’s fresco Hernan Cortés and “la Malinche” (1926), from his cycle at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, he represents the foundational “romance” between the conquistador and Malintzin, a Tabascan woman sold to Cortés who subsequently became his common-­law wife and whose services as a translator enabled the conquest (figure 1).38 He depicts Cortés as an idealized male nude, his marble-­white pallor linking the Spanish claim to racial whiteness with European civilization’s appropriation of Greek and Roman antiquity. Conversely, Orozco paints Malinche as an ethnographic nude. Her body, while desirable, does not conform to conventional Western standards of beauty. Rather, she has a stout frame and rich brown skin. Her facial features are wide and flat, conjuring a composite type—the Mesoamerican Indian—rather than an ideal. A slight, dark-­skinned man lies face down, crushed beneath Cortés’s foot. The conquest is thereby dramatized through a surprisingly bloodless exchange as Malinche is separated from her people by a dominant Cortés to become the figurative mother of the modern mestizo. In this fresco, Orozco represents mestizaje through the trope Introduction  7

1 José Clemente Orozco, Hernan Cortés and “la Malinche,” 1926

of heterosexual romance and patriarchal kinship relations. The conquest is presented as an asymmetrical masculine competition for control over the reproductive female body. Orozco’s Cortés is a powerful, active visionary, as suggested by his monumental, sculpted body and stern, distanced gaze. His outstretched arm asserts possession of his conquest. Malinche, on the other hand, is soft, passive, and mysterious. Her eyes are closed, indicating an impassive temperament and inscrutable motivations. She is not only unknowable but, via Cortés’s gesture, unreachable. Her ambiguous relationship to Cortés suggests a certain anxiety about the ability of postrevolutionary intellectuals to effectively access or manage indigeneity. Would the revaluation of the Indian ultimately trouble the gender/race hierarchy this form of allegorization attempts to stabilize? Orozco’s ambivalent treatment of this foundational fiction suggests period anxieties over both miscegenation and the cultural politics of indigenismo.

Rivera’s Social Mestizaje If Orozco’s image recapitulates the biological discourses underpinning postrevolutionary mestizaje, Diego Rivera explores its Janus face. In his cycle at the Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública [sep]), Rivera makes an elaborate argument for a social mestizaje in which class and culture are ethnicized. In his cycle social change is achieved through revolution and industrial production, not biological reproduction. Nonetheless, if Orozco uses gender hierarchy to assuage anxieties over miscegenation, Rivera mobilizes gender difference to assuage anxieties over social equality and modernization. Take, for example, Our Bread (1928), located on the third floor of the Court of Fiestas (figure 2). Here a dark-­skinned communist worker presides

over a humble meal of bread and fruit. Seated at the table are representatives of the young and old; light and dark; working, popular, and middle classes, demonstrating the social unity of the new political order. Rivera situates his frugal repast within a productive landscape of factories and grain silos. A Tehuana bearing a woven basket filled with indigenous fruits stands behind the worker, marking the location as Mexican. Behind her, peasants, laborers, and soldiers amass as participants and guardians in the new social order. The Tehuana’s pose echoes the industrial architecture in the distance. In this way Rivera suggests that industrial modernity will be grounded in the “authentic” values and culture that she represents. Like the Tehuana’s traditional costume, indigenous culture will persevere. But social differences will cease to matter as an egalitarian political order and socially just economic system enables a hybrid society. Unlike Vasconcelos’s espousal of a spiritually directed racial eugenics, for Rivera, mestizaje means a demographically mixed society, with culture as its unifying medium. Even as Rivera constitutes the Tehuanas as powerful matriarchs and deploys them in his cycle to ensure that women are represented as essential members of postrevolutionary society, his social mestizaje is still configured through the gender hierarchy of the heteronormative family form. Thus, like Malinche in Orozco’s fresco, Rivera’s Tehuana functions as a boundary figure for the nation. Modernity is male and active, as evidenced here in the indigenized communist patriarch presiding over the meal or the numerous images of armed peasants and workers throughout this cycle; tradition is female, bountiful, and reproductive. In this way, Rivera recycles the gendered trope of Orozco’s racial romance, but without his ambivalence. As these examples reveal, even as postrevolutionary artists and intellectuals sought to revalue Introduction  9

2 Diego Rivera, Our Bread, 1928

the Indian in order to promote a mestizo ideal, they reconfigured the former as naturally subordinate by associating indigenous culture with the feminine. Adriana Zavala has written the most extensive analysis of the intersection of race, class, and gender in Mexico’s modern visual culture.39 She argues that again and again, the Indian and indigenous culture were feminized in order to reassert the racial order and patriarchal privilege of Mexico’s bourgeois reformers after the chaos of the revolution. Here, the de facto subordination of women in Mexico’s gender hierarchy served to naturalize the disciplining of indigenous cultures and peoples within the new order of mestizo nationalism. Moreover, she demonstrates that women were burdened with the task of performing their allegiance to the nation by embracing traditional (read: indigenous) dress and mores and renouncing styles and behaviors associated with internationalizing modernity. Thus, paradoxically, being a modern woman in postrevolutionary Mexico meant performing tradition.

Cuevas’s Parodic Mestizaje Cuevas’s parable demonstrates Zavala’s point. Juan’s behavior clearly makes him a parody of Diego Rivera, one of the greatest self-­conscious performers of Mexico’s postrevolutionary “mestizo modernism.”40 Like Rivera, Juan begins his career as an avant-­garde artist influenced by European modernism only to renounce this cosmopolitanism for a highly stylized nationalism that involves wearing overalls and huaraches and declaring tequila the greatest drink in the whole world. Juan/Rivera’s machismo is indicated in his donning a mustache like Zapata and in his powers to transform his wife into an emblem of his nationalist performance by having her dress as a Tehuana.

In this detail, Cuevas refers to Frida Kahlo in particular and more generally to the bourgeois intellectual practice of “playing Indian” as a demonstration of radical nationalist sentiments during the heady 1920s and 1930s.41 While Cuevas effectively parodies this practice, he does not analyze it for what it reveals about the race and gender politics of postrevolutionary nationalism. That is, Juan/Rivera is clearly being lampooned for his class passing—his transformation from bourgeois artist to overall-­wearing (read: worker) “revolutionary”—but the ethnic drag implicit in this transformation, as well as its instantiation through the performative body of his wife, remains unelaborated in Cuevas’s exposé of the pernicious effects of the “cactus curtain.” Not only is Cuevas incapable of imagining Juan’s/Rivera’s wife’s performance as an intentional act of her own nationalism, but he also accepts without question the period link between the indigenous and the female body. Ultimately it is not Juan who figures postrevolutionary indigenismo but rather his wife. And while Juan’s wife’s performance is also inauthentic—a modern woman passing as a traditional Tehuana—it signals the gender aporias that structure postrevolutionary mestizaje. By calling attention to the highly gendered nature of postrevolutionary mestizaje, I am not making the rather banal observation that mural artists were sexist. Rather, I am claiming that any analysis of postrevolutionary national culture— revolutionary or official—requires that we ask how gender differences are perpetuated or naturalized, and to what end. If Bartra is correct in arguing that nationalism is an “ideology that uses culture to hide its intimate means of domination,” then surely the maintenance of normative gender identities is one of those means. Thus, throughout this text, my approach to postrevolutionary nationalism draws from the insights of feminist scholars. I seek to recharacterize national disIntroduction  11

course from one heroically concerned with race and class equality to one anxiously invested in race and gender inequality. If, as Bartra asserts, the muralists played a key part in the “creation of an ensemble of myths about Mexican identity” and mestizaje helped to “establish a structural relationship between the nature of culture and the particularities of the state,” how were these cultural techniques and discourses inserted into institutional life? In the next section I argue that the public museum articulated national identity to the political culture of the postrevolutionary state.

Museums: The Insertion of Mural Art into Institutional Life (Political Culture) Most studies of Mexican muralism have celebrated the populist and indigenist iconography of the artists, their contributions to a purportedly more egalitarian national imaginary, and their heroic attempts to forge a social realism committed to the ideological values of Marxism.42 Scholars tend to focus on the first decade of the mural project (1924–34), or those murals executed in the United States during the 1930s, when for the most part state patronage had dried up.43 For these scholars the resignation in 1924 of José Vasconcelos signals a turning point in the development of mural art as a revolutionary art form. During the Obregón administration (1921–24), federal commissions were doled out on an ad hoc basis. In the absence of any established tradition, artists experimented with technique and subject matter, which resulted in many “false starts”44 but allowed them to avoid the “uniform ideological coloration” that characterizes muralism in the following decade.45 The murals executed during Vasconcelos’s 12   Introduction

tenure are ideologically and stylistically diverse; however, by 1924, under the influence of the Communist Party, a more politically radical mural art had emerged. In their 1923 manifesto, the newly unionized painters, sculptors, and technical workers repudiated bourgeois individualism and proclaimed their desire to make art of “ideological value to the people.” “The ideal goal of art,” they concluded, “should be one of beauty for all, of education and of battle.”46 While middle-­class audiences balked at the violent messages and communist insignia that began to crop up in federally patronized murals, cultural administrators would soon recognize the political utility of an avowedly socialist art. Under Vasconcelos’s successor José Manuel Puig Casauranc, the sep took a more radical turn; however, state patronage contracted as Rivera and artists working either for him or in his style— referred to disparagingly as “Diegitos”—dominated federal commissions. This period coinciding with the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles and his proxies (Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and Abelardo Rodríguez [1924–34]), known as the Maximato, augurs the ascent of a centralized and authoritarian state. It was Calles, the Jefe Máximo (supreme leader), who created Mexico’s single-­ party rule, and under his direction, Mexico’s ten-­ year civil war became an institutionalized myth of national unity that foreclosed further rebellion while endlessly deferring the promise of reform.47 Despite the Maximato, the leftward turn of the government during Lázaro Cárdenas’s presidency (1934–40) signals a brief return of revolutionary possibilities that, among these scholars, is retroactively attributed to mural art’s heroic first decade. For example, David Craven claims that the “semi-­insurgent” period of the 1930s, and particularly the Cárdenas years, enabled greater autonomy for radical artists because the state was concerned with institution building at the na-

tional level.48 Craven’s argument about the 1930s depends heavily on the radicalism of the Cárdenas years, which he maintains redirected the state toward true popular representation in an attempt to undo the “rightward drift” of the Calles regime and counter-­revolutionary Maximato that he installed.49 However, other scholars have complicated this view of the Cárdenas presidency, arguing that he actually strengthened one-­party rule by installing a semi-­corporate system that granted popular sectors direct representation in the party. While this followed the obliteration of multiple parties under the Maximato and gave labor, peasant, and popular sectors direct representation, it expanded membership and cemented the ruling party (formerly the National Revolutionary Party, now the Party of the Mexican Revolution, and soon to be the pri) as the base of presidential power thereafter.50 James Oles has written the most extensive study of mural art during the 1930s.51 His more nuanced account supports Craven’s general contention that the Cárdenas years enabled greater autonomy for mural artists; however, he complicates Craven’s conclusions about the relationship between the state and radical art. Oles argues that toward the end of the Maximato, mural commissions proliferated, and artists who had been forced to work abroad or in provincial cities returned to the capital to resume their careers. “By the 1930s,” he writes, muralism “was a heterogeneous force (rather than a defined ‘movement’) marked by competing and overlapping strategies played out by a wide range of participants.”52 However, he points out that far from consolidating these strategies under renewed state patronage, Cárdenas’s final break with Calles’s control in 1936 resulted in a shift in cultural policy that brought about the withdrawal of federal support for mural art, and an investment instead in mass media such as radio, films, and posters.53

Thus the spectacular projects that Craven attributes to Cárdenas’s political radicalism— Orozco’s masterpiece at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara (1938–39) and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s dynamic stairwell mural, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939–40), painted at the headquarters of the Electricians’ Syndicate, among others—were actually carried out under the auspices of municipal patrons, corporate entities, and leftist organizations, not the Cárdenas state. As Oles notes, Rivera and Orozco received only one federal commission between 1934 and 1940. Nonetheless, in the absence of robust state patronage, less well-­known yet highly accomplished artists from Mexico and abroad painted murals throughout the countryside in socialist schools, in casinos and international hotels in regional tourist destinations, and even in a working-­class market in Mexico City.54 It was Cárdenas’s succession by Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and the so-­called businessman president Miguel Alemán (1946–52), therefore, that brought mural art back into the embrace of a self-­promoting state. Shifra Goldman argues that this renewal of state patronage marks “the end of Mexico’s revolutionary phase and the beginning of the development of a national industrial and bureaucratic bourgeoisie controlling the government.”55 While some would argue that a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” always controlled the postrevolutionary government, Goldman’s comment identifies a sea change in the rhetoric of state actors. Whereas before the 1940s, presidents and administrators were likely to invoke the “revolutionary” values of social justice or popular nationalism, after the 1940s they tended to espouse the virtues of capitalist development or a cosmopolitan internationalism. This period of transition witnessed a decline in the quality of muralism, Goldman asserts, but an increase in the quantity of murals.56 After 1940, Introduction  13

federal commissions proliferated while private and corporate patronage kept pace. Murals were integrated, as didactic supports and ornamentation, into a burgeoning governmental infrastructure of public museums, in addition to banks, hospitals, federal housing projects, schools, and ministry buildings. This boom reached a high point in 1958 then dropped off until 1964, when once again federal mural commissions rose dramatically as part of a program of cultural expansion by President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) in the run-­up to the 1968 Olympics.57 By 1969 this period of intense activity had come to a close as the federal government shifted its attention to neo-­populist initiatives in an attempt to contain the political damage of the massacre at Tlatelolco. Muralism would remain a venerated national art form, but it would never again receive federal support at the levels it enjoyed between 1940 and 1968. Thus despite the vitality and innovation of mural art in the 1920s and 1930s, it reached its apogee in the decades following World War II. This was the only time that muralism enjoyed steady federal support. Likewise, it was in the 1950s that muralism became a sacralized form of national art promoted at home and abroad by a state eager to stake a claim on modernity. This is why most scholars focus on the political context of the 1920s and early 1930s and relegate post-­1940s muralism to the category of political compromise. The history I present here takes the consolidation of the postrevolutionary ruling party during the Maximato as a point of departure rather than terminus. I map the relationship between mural art, cultural policy, and the development of official institutions for defining and delimiting national culture, history, and origins from 1934, when Orozco and Rivera were called back to Mexico to execute murals at the new Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. I reveal that the struggle over mural art’s 14   Introduction

role in the consolidation of state power was very much alive in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the end of the Cárdenas sexenio (six-­year term) marks not the end of mural art’s revolutionary ambitions but rather a shift in the locus of this struggle from municipal, regional, and corporate locales back to the capital city and its burgeoning infrastructure of public museums. By shifting our attention from the immediate postrevolutionary years to those surrounding World War II, I am writing against the implicit claims of the standard “heroic” and “statist” periodization of the mural movement. I am not suggesting that post-­1940s mural art is politically “innocent,” but rather that insofar as mural art was complicit with the governmental agenda of the state, it was so from its very inception. What matters for me is not rescuing post-­1940s muralism from accusations of political compromise by indicting the first phase as well. Rather, I am interested in how the governmental agenda motivating the state’s cultural project was instrumentalized and made effective. This, I argue, requires that we explore the mural projects that took place after the 1930s, not because those that came before were any less implicated in state power, but rather because they were not yet very effective as techniques of that power. The questions before us, therefore, are not ones of moral judgment (i.e., Was muralism innocent or complicit in the consolidation of the state?). Rather, they are historical questions about the political effects of institutionalization. Instead of making general claims about the movement as a whole, however, I focus on specific struggles within one axis of institutionalization that allow us to assess mural art in relation to the governmental agenda of an evolving state apparatus and according to the problems artists identified and the goals they set for their practice. Only in this sense can we retrospectively pronounce on the

success or failure of muralism as a political and cultural project. Having argued that mural artists participated in the formation of a national myth and that the museum is a key locus for tracing, historically, the insertion of mural art into institutional life, I now turn to the ideology directing the process. How do murals address their audiences to achieve certain effects? And what role does the institution play in directing or redirecting that address? If museums are effective agents of social governance, how do they shape the public’s interpretation of mural art in ways that serve the ideological interests of the state? Further, how do we measure or assess the museum effect where mural art is concerned? To broach these questions, we need to consider first how the relationship between mural art and government institutions is currently understood. Therefore, I turn now to the problem of theorizing institutionalization and its effects on the viewing subject.

Cultural Policy: “The Ideology that Attempts to Explain and Direct the Process” I am not the first scholar to implicate the “heroic” phase of mural art in the hegemonic projects of a consolidating state, nor am I the first to draw attention to institutionalization as the agent of this process. The education historian Mary Kay Vaughan acknowledges the contradictions of the immediate postrevolutionary period, arguing that the muralists helped to affirm working-­class and peasant participation in the revolution even as the populist ideology they articulated functioned as a mechanism of social control. “Rivera’s murals,” she writes, “in a sense provided the emerging Mexican state with illustrations of the kind of populism which flowed heavily from politicians’

rhetoric.” Overdetermined by their placement in official government buildings, Vaughan asserts, mural art inevitably reflected a “government ideology and in effect help[ed] to provide one.”58 The art historian Leonard Folgarait concurs. He argues that the political compromises of the 1940s were determined from the outset by the “contradiction of a conservative and stabilizing post-­Revolutionary society promoted as Revolutionary by its political elite.”59 “As they were mostly found on the walls of official buildings and were accessible and very large,” he concludes, murals “operated within the semiotic social system of the day as symptomatic of the paternalizing generosity of the patron: the government.”60 Folgarait, like Vaughan and Paz before him, argues that despite the revolutionary convictions of the artists, the location of their work in the ritual spaces of a consolidating political regime overdetermined their effect on audiences. “To look at the paintings,” he writes, “meant to look at, to pay heed to, the government itself.”61 While I agree with Vaughan and Folgarait that state patronage established mural art as a technique of governance from the outset, I find their characterization of institutionalization and its effects on the viewing subject under-­theorized and lacking historical specificity. Folgarait states outright what most scholars imply, that “the murals helped to create a Revolutionary citizen as a subject of the post-­Revolution.”62 Yet he acknowledges that in the 1920s and early 1930s there was no attempt on the part of the government to develop a public for mural art. While many people saw the murals, the state did not target particular populations for exposure, nor did cultural administrators attempt to put an official spin on their meaning. Vaughan also notes the lack of a “systematic effort to educate the public about mural art and its meaning from the perspective of the artists.”63 For her, this is why the revolutionary Introduction  15

messages embedded in their iconography were so easily overdetermined by the governmental authority of their institutional supports. While Folgarait and Vaughan differ over the degree of opposition between the ideology of the muralists and their federal patrons, both imply that the political effects of mural art—radical or hegemonic—were a function of the visual idiom (social realism) and iconographic programs (revolutionary and populist subject matter) of the murals working in concert with their placement in government buildings. When attempting to link the style and content of murals to the thought or behavior of actual viewers, they call upon “reception aesthetics” to posit an ideal viewing subject implicit within the visual strategies the artists employed to convey their meaning.64 But this elision between the ideal subject posited within the aesthetic dimensions of the work and the actual viewing subjects of the work has been problematized by theorists, historians, ethnographers, and the like. To paraphrase Judith Butler, both Vaughan and Folgarait import a “sovereign performativity” to visual communication that we know from reception studies cannot be sustained.65 In her critique of contemporary attempts to attribute a sovereign performativity to language, Butler reminds us that signification is inherently unstable. She writes, “Power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its ‘speaker,’ to a sovereign representative of the state.”66 Nonetheless, the fact that “power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty . . . in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way. . . . The historical loss of the sovereign organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return.”67 Visual language is perhaps more and less stable than written or spoken language. More, in that much of it traffics in a realism that is best naturalized in photography, but which also operates in those representations that have been positioned 16   Introduction

as documents or representative objects within history museums, for example. Conversely, the visual is often less stable than spoken or written language when it is placed within the genre of art. Thus, deciphering the meaning of any cultural practice is not only contingent upon contextualization but also heavily dependent upon education, cultural competency, and the taste-­culture of a particular habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated.68 In order to resist the elision of ideal and actual viewing subjects that sovereign notions of institutional and state power entail, I turn to Tony Bennett’s work on cultural policy. Given the essential openness of visual culture, Bennett eschews altogether the analysis of textual or visual signification when trying to assess what a cultural practice means. “The programmatic, institutional, and governmental conditions in which cultural practices are inscribed,” he writes, “have a substantive priority over the semiotic properties of such practices.” Accordingly, Bennett urges scholars to explore how and in what ways cultural practices are made useful for the purposes of social governance. “These conditions,” he contends, establish “the regions of person or citizen formation to which specific types of cultural practice are connected and the manner in which, as part of developed technologies, they function to achieve specific kinds of effects.”69 Bennett’s formulation does not promise that through cultural policy we can better apprehend what actual viewers think or experience when looking at a work of art or a museum display. But by emphasizing the way displays attempt to make murals useful for the purposes of government, his approach does suggest a way to examine the particular effects on citizen-­subjects that muralism was enlisted to achieve. Thus it enables a specificity lacking in more general claims about the effects of state apparatuses on reception that derive from reception aesthetics alone. All the historians cited note that the location

of murals in government buildings made them, in effect, government propaganda. While most scholars address architectural concerns to the extent that they informed signification, formal choices, or the artist’s political intentions, they do little to explicate how these institutional settings and the murals painted on their walls enacted state ideology. Short of simply representing radical messages that all historians agree were mostly inaccessible and probably illegible to broad popular audiences, how were these images made useful by the postrevolutionary state? If indeed they were powerful players in the governmental constitution of well-­tempered citizen-­subjects and a modern nation-­state, what was the mechanism of their instrumentalization? Following Bennett’s model of cultural studies, I argue that the political effects of mural art should be sought not only in their representational strategies or through the ideal viewers their aesthetic arrangements posit but also, and just as significantly, in how they were inscribed within the programmatic, institutional, and governmental programs for postrevolutionary modernization, nationalism, and citizen formation. Since the 1930s, murals have been incrementally incorporated into a governmental program for the codification, protection, and dissemination of national culture. This has proceeded largely through the development of a federally subsidized and administered system of public museums dedicated to the fine arts, national and regional history, and the vast archeological and ethnographic wealth produced by ancient and living indigenous groups. This, I argue, has been a crucial mechanism for the instrumentalization of mural art. While I subscribe to Bennett’s basic call to tend to the governing protocols that make use of culture, I deviate from his hard stance on the priority of policy over semiotics. In this book, I marry Bennett’s approach with conventional object analysis by bringing the art historian’s sensi-

tivity to the formal and iconographic qualities of works of art to bear on both murals and (when possible) museum display. I do this not to establish museums and murals as necessarily oppositional practices but rather to lend nuance and specificity to my claims about the governmental dimensions of both. Careful visual analysis of the murals and the displays that frame them allow us to appreciate the specialized techniques devised by artists and state functionaries to “achieve specific kinds of effects” on “regions of person or citizen formation.”70 Moreover, I am compelled to integrate visual and object-­based analysis back into Bennett’s mode of cultural studies, given that style, iconography, composition, and the formal relationship the mural establishes with the viewing subject as well as its institutional frame were paramount concerns in the debate among artists over state patronage and the museum effect. To ignore completely the semiotic properties of these practices would obscure an essential dimension of the history of institutionalization and its designs on the citizen-­subject.

Governance, Truth, Discourse: Reconceptualizing Power and Signification As the foregoing references to “sovereign” and “governmental” power suggest, my approach is informed by Michel Foucault’s late work on “governmentality” in which he sought to examine the intersections of power and subject formation through what he called “the production of truth.” This Foucault is therefore not the Foucault of much literary and cultural studies that stem from his earlier works, somewhat reductively referred to as “genealogy” or the history of “discontinuities” or “rupture.”71 Rather, it is the Foucault that emerges in the second volume of the History of Sexuality and is brought to the fore in his lectures Introduction  17

on “governance,” “techniques of the self,” and “biopower” at the end of his life.72 In this new line of inquiry, communicated largely through a series of lectures and interviews, most of which were translated into English and published posthumously, the theorist revised his earlier work on disciplinarity and elaborated his critique of sovereignty as the privileged model for theorizing power and the subject. The account offered in Foucault’s late work is consistent with the more diffuse model of power and subjectification we find in Bartra’s description of official culture. Moreover, his eschewal of orthodox characterizations of state power and the interpolating processes of culture as ideology in favor of exploring what he called “governmentalities” provides an alternative and, I argue, more accurate way of describing the relationship between the postrevolutionary state and its cultural project, muralism included. In his salutary essay on governmentality, Foucault traces the historical meditation on the exercise of power and characterizes the emergence of modern liberalism as a shift in the conception of sovereign power from one of absolute control to one concerned with ethical governance, that is, managing rather than dominating social life.73 Foucault’s term “governmental” refers, in part, to the mechanisms of rule or governing.74 But, as Nikolas Rose points out, it also signifies a mentality or way of thinking about the exercise of authority that seeks to “realize itself as a practice.”75 Foucault’s coupling of the words “govern” and “mentality” was intended to indicate the importance of expertise or reflection by those endowed with the power to determine the truth of things in the regulation of individual and group conduct. This helps to clarify why governmental power is not simply a synonym for state power, for it is decentralized to the extent that it encompasses the labor of intellectuals and experts operating within state apparatuses but also in corporate and non18   Introduction

governmental organizations as well.76 It is through the production of knowledge that governmental power translates general political goals into effective and realizable practices. Governmentalities, therefore, incorporate both thought and practice, the ways in which humans have reflected on their own conduct as well as that of others and realized those ideas by establishing governing protocols.77 They encompass the myriad “authorities of truth” that affect the way in which we assess true and false accounts of who we are and what we should become.78 Governmental initiatives link questions of being, personal conduct, and identity to questions of politics, authority, and citizenship.79 Governmentality is therefore a political rationality that has a moral concern for what is proper, an epistemological concern for codifying and knowing the subjects it seeks to govern, and a style of reasoning. “Style” here denotes those generic practices or representational techniques that render the phenomenal world thinkable.80 Foucault describes the technologies and practices that organize the individual’s relation to culture and power as the “production of truth.”81 By emphasizing the politics of truth, Foucault rejects the premise of ideology theory, which often describes people’s relationship to power as one of false consciousness, or what he calls an “economy of untruth.”82 In this respect, he anticipates Derek Sayer’s intervention into the other dominant Marxist account of how rulers secure popular consent: Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Sayer writes, “Rule is not centrally about either inculcating beliefs or securing consent”; rather it is about producing and reproducing material forms of sociality, those quotidian rituals that are affirmed through the often cynical, but usually knowing, performances of individuals.83 Foucault’s and Sayer’s claims are confirmed by Cuevas’s account of Juan’s acquiescence to the dictates of official culture. Juan’s performance as

a nationalist artist is knowing, not naive. He engages in this cynical exercise neither at gunpoint nor because he is laboring under false consciousness but rather because of a complex desire to work as a Mexican. Foucault argues, therefore, that “the problem is not changing people’s consciousness—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.”84 In this sense, the project is to determine how the truth of Mexicanness gets produced. Accordingly, Toby Miller suggests that we approach the problem of how truth is produced through analyses of what he calls “telling technologies,” those cultural practices and spaces that “tell stories about who and how ‘we’ are.”85 The museum is one such truth-­telling technology wherein the forms of popular identification are articulated and social conduct is shaped to create citizen-­subjects who act in the interests of the state. Within the museum, culture is produced, targeted, and instrumentalized through liberal political rationalities. However, as Miller argues, telling technologies are never completely overdetermining. Rather, they are laden with struggle and always potentially revisable. Even in the most solidified epistemological fields, popular sentiment must be routinely produced and secured. Miller describes the ways that officials try to capture popular support by claiming to have their allegiance or by asserting that they represent the people’s wishes or interests as the “pursuit of the popular.” He calls this a pursuit because the people can never entirely be dominated or represented through the rhetorical politics of governmental agencies or individuals that would like to secure their allegiance.86 This is precisely what Bartra means when he argues that the “identification of politics with culture . . . cannot be produced artificially” by either the state or the ruling class.87 By characterizing it as a “global process shaped by the interplay of several factors,”88 Bartra, like Foucault, Bennett,

and Miller, seeks to move us away from repressive theories of power and toward an understanding of power as both “positive” in the sense of its productive capacity to constitute objects, subjects, truths, and the like, and “technical” in its links to social governance.89 It is important to note here that it has been difficult for scholars to translate Foucault’s theoretical framework from the macropolitical considerations of institutional formations such as medical, penal, or educational systems to micropolitical acts such as the creation or viewing of a work of art, without reducing his discursive model to yet another theory of representation. In this book, I bring the object back into the analysis of institutional discursive formations by linking the formal and conceptual properties of works of art to the ideological or rhetorical properties of exhibition and display. This is the strength of my focus on the intersection of murals and the museum, for it allows us to consider, in tandem, the discursive forces seeking to constitute the objects and subjects of knowledge on display along with the actual objects that constitute said displays. In this book I treat both murals and museum exhibition as techniques of governmental power. I show that artists, curators, politicians, and other state actors were engaged in the struggle over the “truths” regarding muralism as a radical art form, the meaning of the revolution in Mexican history, and the nature of Mexico’s mestizo identity. As a consequence, I quote extensively from the artists themselves, as well as the other interested parties involved in the postrevolutionary cultural project. However, I proffer the claims of artists not as disinterested expressions of intention but rather as statements within the play of statements that together formed the “discursive régime” of postrevolutionary nationalism.90 In this respect I follow Foucault’s genealogical model, which he describes in interviews as “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowlIntroduction  19

edges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.”91 In his repeated calls for an emphasis on the discursive production of truth, Foucault critiques both the Marxist assumption that the truth exists outside ideology, and thus power, and the humanist presumption that individuals are the unfettered agents of history. However, his genealogy is not a history without actors, events, or unequal power relations but rather a call for “seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.”92 I take up Foucault’s claim by arguing that mural art and museum exhibition, while not inherently true or false, are discursive sites that produce truth effects. By focusing on the cultural production of truth rather than pronouncing on the inherent truth or falseness of these discursive practices, I assess the politics of public culture without resorting to moral judgments about the ideological virtue or mendacity of individual artists or unfounded claims about the impact of their murals on actual viewers. In what follows, I treat the visual polemics of individual murals as well as the claims made about them by the artists who created them as discursive statements to be evaluated alongside the statements uttered in the institutional voice of exhibition copy, the hortatory registers of politicians’ speeches, the rhetorical flourishes of public intellectuals and essayists, and the “scientific” claims of museum practitioners. At times these statements align in a kind of harmonic resonance creating powerful popular truths, while at others their cacophony reveals a genuine battle over an emergent truth claim. My contention is that through the museum, mural art played an important role in postrevolutionary Mexico’s “political economy of truth.”93 20   Introduction

As Foucault notes, every society has its “regime of truth . . . the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true.”94 Modern art is rarely granted a truth-­telling role in these regimes. In postrevolutionary Mexico, through the institutional apparatus of the museum, mural art became a technique of didactic museology and, as such, a technique of exercising power. However, murals were hardly monolithic in either their aesthetic or conceptual arguments. The extent to which it appears today that they were suggests that a critical historical analysis of the public museum’s role in shaping the meaning and reception of muralism is necessary.

Muralism’s Museum Moment: The Politics of Didactic Exhibition In Mexico (as in France), the birth of the museum coincided with the birth of the liberal nation-­ state. The National Museum was founded in 1825 by presidential decree. However, it was not until after the revolution of 1910 that museums began to proliferate.95 Whereas in 1917 there were only two public museums in the country, by 1964 there were at least forty museums of various types in Mexico City alone.96 Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the museum in Mexico evolved from a fairly crude storehouse of antiquities and pagan objects to a highly organized space of regulation, education, and citizenship.97 Today museums are Mexico’s calling card within the international arena, and those in the capital city are renowned tourist destinations. Federal museums like the new Museo de Arte Popular (f. 2006) and municipally supported museums like Carlos Monsiváis’s Museo del Estanquillo (f. 2007) continue to proliferate alongside private initiatives like Carlos Slim’s Museo Soumaya (f. 1994) and the Colección Jumex (f. 2000).

But the museumification of Mexico extends well beyond the walls of actual museums to encompass the urban fabric of the capital city as well as the nation’s many pre-­Columbian heritage sites. As Quetzil Castañeda argues, even the nation’s contemporary indigenous peoples are experienced by tourists, both foreign and domestic, as ethnographic displays.98 Any visitor to Mexico City notices immediately the way the city’s historical layers have been excavated and marked to reveal its pre-­Columbian, colonial, and modern majesty. Streets are named after articles of the constitution, historical events and figures, and the values instantiated in the revolution such as “prosperity” and “progress.” The vast subway system brings the commuter into constant contact with Mexican history, through both the naming of subway stations after the likes of Hidalgo or Cuatros Caminos and the endless museum-­style displays of cultural artifacts and reproductions that associate each stop with some event in Mexico’s past. Likewise, the lugares para cultura (“places for culture”) located in the large subway hubs provide satellite exhibition spaces for the government’s various cultural institutions and educational initiatives. Cultural institutions have been indexed to education and national initiatives since Mexico won its independence from Spain; however, with the establishment of the sep in 1921, an increasingly professionalized institutional infrastructure capable of reaching mass audiences was set in motion. Vasconcelos not only brought the National Museum under the umbrella of the sep but also advocated the creation of new museums for the conservation, protection, and diffusion of Mexico’s artistic and monumental patrimony.99 The historian Augusto Urteaga Castro-­Pozo asserts that with the creation of the sep, museums were utilized as “cultural spaces through which the ideology of revolutionary nationalism, the prod-

uct of the popular movement of 1910–17, would be diffused.”100 It took several decades for Mexico’s museum practitioners to figure out how to effectively diffuse the ideology of revolutionary nationalism to the public. Muralism was instrumental to this project. Mural artists not only articulated a postrevolutionary nationalism rooted specifically in the popular struggle of the revolution but also devised the didactic and exhibitionary techniques necessary for communicating this ideology to a broad and often illiterate citizenry. The populist orientation and visual solutions pioneered by Diego Rivera, in particular, would inform the display strategies developed in museums over the decades to come. Through a sophisticated use of architectural space, Rivera turned mural art into a narrative form in which national history could be relayed visually to its viewing public as they moved through the building. In this respect, his mature frescos recall their origins in the liturgical and ritual use of decoration in Catholic churches. In both cases, artists exploited architecture for its processional and performative capacities when planning their iconographic programs. In his breakthrough cycle at the sep, Rivera first elaborated a national narrative in which the recent revolution represented not the eternal recurrence of violence in Mexican history but rather the foundation of its political future.101 Furthermore, he characterized the revolution as an organized popular movement with indigenous origins and a progressive proletarian future. In this way, Rivera figured out what no one else had up to that point: how to make sense of Mexico’s violent history and how to literally envision the nation and its people in a way that was ideologically useful and broadly legible. In short, Rivera was able to marry nationalist modernism with socialist politics in a public art that was not only populist but also, and more importantly, future oriented. Rather than wallowing in the miseries of the past or articuIntroduction  21

lating a cynical view of humanity, Rivera’s murals celebrated popular agency, arguing that a dialectical process was under way that would help Mexico achieve social equality and modernity. Within this story, Mexico’s violent history of conquest and social exploitation was but a prelude to an epic unfolding of national destiny. Rivera was thus able to craft a national narrative that sewed together the past, present, and future. Moreover, his amalgamation of figuration with cubist space fashioned a distinctly Mexican and socialist idiom out of academic and avant-­ garde styles. It was for these reasons, as much as the artist’s legendary skill at self-­promotion, that Rivera was adopted as a quasi-­official artist by the postrevolutionary government in the 1930s. While the state never explicitly nominated any artist as its mouthpiece, bureaucrats and institutions alike showed favor to particular artists at particular times and promoted their work through exhibitions while awarding them high-­profile commissions. Rivera’s visual and conceptual solutions to the “Mexican problem” left an indelible imprint on the official reconstruction of national culture and history in postrevolutionary museums, even after his death in 1957. His narrative style, realist aesthetic, populist iconography, and socialist politics established the coordinates for an official culture as well as the didactic use of architectural space that museologists would exploit in the decades to come. For these reasons, he remained a rhetorical foil for artists like Cuevas long after his political influence as an official artist had waned. This book is as much about museums as it is about mural art, for the social function and political effects of one, I argue, cannot be adequately grasped if one does not understand its relationship to the other. Before 1934, access to mural art was largely restricted to middle-­class students and government functionaries. While students’ and workers’ organizations in the countryside were 22   Introduction

shown images of murals in reproduction, and artists worked with communities through the cultural missions to execute wall paintings in rural areas, the frescos intended for a broad public were actually limited to a mostly cosmopolitan urban audience. Federal museums not only placed this art form in an ostensibly greater public sphere but also explicated the often hermetic content of mural art via text panels, didactic displays, and exhibitionary strategies that proffered these grand wall paintings as truthful accounts of historical fact, not mere creative expressions or partisan political tracts. The murals located in museums, as opposed to those in government buildings, schools, and corporate lobbies, are surrounded by artifacts, historical documentation, and exegetical texts. They are integrated into exhibitionary narratives and displays that render specific interpretations of their meaning readily accessible to large numbers of foreign and domestic visitors. While museums endeavor to explain and instrumentalize the political messages in mural art, they also constrain the radical potential of this art form by providing singular and authoritative interpretations of its iconographic and formal features that at times even contradict the artists’ intentions. Furthermore, these institutional frames quite literally constituted mural art as heritage and a movement per se, thereby sacralizing and depoliticizing the aesthetic experiments enacted by its competing practitioners. But this story is not unidirectional, for if museums gave murals a coherence and publicity they lacked in 1920s Mexico, murals made museums increasingly legible and communicative to the public in which they sought to instill Mexican identity, modern subjectivity, and a civic consciousness. Mural art provided Mexico’s postrevolutionary institutions with a serviceable version of national history, an ideologically powerful vision of Mexican society, and they helped shape the

recent bloody and highly factionalized ten-­year civil war into a meaningful and even necessary stage in the development of national autonomy and postcolonial self-­realization. In a 1983 interview, Iker Larrauri, one of Mexico’s internationally esteemed museum practitioners, locates the origins of Mexican museography in the muralists’ “anthropological” approach to their plastic endeavors. From its example, he argues, Mexican museology derives its “intention to create historical consciousness, to consolidate national identity through didactic presentations of national culture . . . that show not only the products of this culture but also the processes that generated them.”102 Larrauri’s claim about the link between muralism and museology should be viewed not as empirical fact but rather as a deliberate attempt to harness the ethical claims of mural artists to postrevolutionary museum practice. As a participant in the development of didactic exhibition, Larrauri is not an objective witness but rather a highly partisan player in the history of postrevolutionary museology. His claim, therefore, while interested, carries a certain explanatory weight when one is trying to assess the extent to which mural art informed this burgeoning science. Larrauri’s perception of mural art as a visual technology capable of showcasing both the products of Mexican culture and the processes that generated them suggests that not only the iconographic but also the narrative and formal properties of this particular art form were primary resources for the development of effective display techniques. While the ideological relationship between museums and murals is generally recognized in Mexico, the mutually constitutive nature of these two powerful technologies of national truth has yet to be seriously considered in the art historical scholarship on muralism or the developing critical discourse on museums in either Mexico or the Euro-­American academy. Therefore, in this

book, I pursue this link by tracing the relationship between Mexican muralism and the nation’s three most important public museums: the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum. My focus on these three institutions is not arbitrary, nor is it unnecessarily reductive. Together, they tell the official story of Mexico: its culture, its history, and the origins of its national identity. Moreover, each museum represents a different genre of museum and thereby situates the murals within in different ways. The Palace of Fine Arts is essentially a Kunsthalle. The murals are installed alone, without displays to contextualize them, and presented as fine art. At the National History Museum, murals are integral parts of the permanent installation. They are situated among other artifacts as part of an elaborate historical narrative. The murals at this museum are thus presented not as fine art but rather as didactic objects and historical artifacts in and of themselves. Finally, the murals at the National Anthropology Museum function as both didactic supports for the exhibitions and decorative objects meant to enhance the museum’s spectacular architecture and displays. At this museum, murals are presented as emblems of Mexico’s mestizo modernity and thus contemporary counterparts to the impressive artistic legacy of the nation’s ethnographic cultures of origin. Located in the two most trafficked public leisure zones in Mexico City—the Alameda, near the historic center, and Chapultepec Park—the Palace of Fine Arts, National History Museum, and National Anthropology Museum receive the lion’s share of domestic and international visitors. These spectacular spaces form the backbone of the official cultural infrastructure responsible for the phenomenon registered but never fully explicated by the authors surveyed in this chapter. Thus it is no coincidence that the conversion of Introduction  23

Cuevas’s protagonist takes place at the Palace of Fine Arts, for this institution initiated the process of restructuring mural art according to “established canons.” Similarly, when Paz drafted his indictment of the massacre at Tlatelolco in Postdata, he concluded with the admonition that any “political, social, and moral critique” of the regime must include a critique of the National Anthropology Museum, which he argued was the “apotheosis” and “apocalypse” of the state’s ideological use of postrevolutionary nationalism and, in particular, the revolutionary indigenismo the muralists helped to enshrine.103 Only the National History Museum remains somewhat neglected in the critical literature on postrevolutionary cultural institutions. This omission is ironic, given that it was here that museologists first figured out how to channel the radical valence of muralism into a patriotic expression of national becoming. Through these case studies I demonstrate that murals contributed to and agitated against the development of a governmental museum practice in postrevolutionary Mexico. As a consequence, the murals painted within museums are treated not as decontextualized images but rather as complex material practices that are deeply integrated into and affected by these museum contexts and the exhibitionary practices and architecture that frame them. It is in this sense, according to Francisco Reyes Palma, that “the mural device, understood as a vision and meaning machine, unfolded as part of the government’s cultural activities in unison with the artists’ private initiatives and acted as a part of the materiality of physical spaces, as well as a mental realm, modeling consciousness and sen-

24   Introduction

sibilities.”104 Reyes Palma’s “mural device” is an instance of Bartra’s “political culture.” But one has to wonder if, without the museum, the mural device could have become official culture at all. These three museums have been more than just any site of governmental culture. As the places where Mexican culture has been codified, historical citizenship defined, and Mexicanness, as a mestizo identity, represented, they are exemplary institutions for the shaping of popular subjects and the restructuring of cultural practices “according to established canons.” In these museums the myths of national identity are connected to official culture through political culture. Through these museums, a diverse, contentious, and experimental phenomenon was shaped into a coherent movement with a canon of greats and given a homogenized ideological inflection. Only once the idiosyncratic and often hermetic messages of individual murals were restructured according to the “official canons of national culture” could murals become politically effective instruments of the state.105 Thus it was not institutionalization in and of itself but rather a particular kind of institutionalization—the public museum— that transformed mural art into an official culture capable of the hegemonic effects we attribute to it today. However, as the chapters that follow demonstrate, the political reconstruction of mural art according to the official canons of national culture proceeded through a paradoxical process that entailed not only muralists and museum practitioners but also the very artists and critics aligned against the cactus curtain.

1

A Palace for the People

Mexican mural painters have been turned into plaster saints. People contemplate their paintings the way devout believers contemplate sacred images. Their walls have become not painted surfaces that we may view but fetishes that we must venerate.  Octavio Paz

In his final presidential address, Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) made his famous declaration that Mexico would “pass once and for all from the historical condition of being a country of one man to being a nation of institutions and laws.”1 Calles was referring to the suppression of caudillismo (strong-­arm political leadership by military figures) through the creation of a modern political party, the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional de la Revolución [pnr]). However, his call for national reconstruction through “institutions and laws” also pertained to a broader cultural campaign for social renewal undertaken in the capital city that involved the resurrection of a series of unfinished Porfirian projects. At the heart of this campaign was the completion of the half-­built national theater which now became the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) to showcase national dance, theater, music, and fine art (figure 3). The grand inauguration of the Palace on 29 September 1934 announced the beginning of a sustained state-­level investment in an institutional infrastructure for the promotion and dissemination of national culture. As a sign of the

government’s renewed commitment to mural art, the sep commissioned José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera to execute permanent frescos in the Palace’s central atrium. Over the next three decades, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Jorge González Camarena would add permanent works to the Palace interior, while frescoes executed elsewhere by Rivera, Roberto Montenegro, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano would be relocated as acts of state benevolence in the preservation and conservation of what had become a hallowed genre of national patrimony. As a consequence of both the symbolic status of the Palace itself and the evolving logics of federal patronage, the Palace commissions raised political and aesthetic questions for mural artists. Would mural art remain a revolutionary art committed to socializing artistic expression? Or would it be institutionally reconstituted as a form of cultural heritage? Was mural art a political device engaged in local struggles for social and political justice? Or was it a universal fine art engaged in international struggles over the meaning and direction of modern art? The unified movement that the Palace en-

3 Exterior view of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City

sconces today belies a highly contentious struggle over the direction of national art, the legacy of muralism as a revolutionary art form, and the aesthetic politics of the postrevolutionary state that was played out within the Palace and across its walls between 1934 and the late 1960s. As Karen Cordero Reiman argues, even though the works at the Palace are “enveloped in a mythology” that they themselves helped to create, they “do not show a unified vision of Mexico as an essence”; rather each mural exemplifies a moment in the historical and political construction of postrevolutionary mexicanidad.2 In what follows, I reconstitute the complex and contingent history of these commissions and situate them within the 26   A Palace for the People

art world disputes, political calculations, and governmental frameworks that informed and incentivized them. To do this, I have divided the chapter into two parts that correspond with the historical shift from the populist gambit of the Maximato and the internecine struggles of the International Left in the 1930s and 1940s to the cosmopolitan orientation of Alemanismo and the aesthetic politics of the cultural cold war in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, I chronicle the public debates among mural artists over the proper relationship between art and politics in order to better appreciate the goals and limits of their engagement with this institution. In this way, I show how muralism became

the sacralized art form that Paz decries in the epigraph. However, I also demonstrate that Paz played a paradoxical role in the erection of the “wax museum” of Mexican muralism.3 As a vocal critic of los tres grandes and an advocate of Rufino Tamayo, Paz helped to reconstitute the first generation of Mexican muralism as a monolithic icon of postrevolutionary socialism. Likewise, his criticism of the mural renaissance helped to broker Tamayo’s entry into the ultimate space of cultural consecration, the Palace of Fine Arts. This, ironically, enabled the conversion of mural art from a revolutionary political device to a signifier of Mexico’s claim on artistic modernism, from a socially engaged aesthetic experiment to sacred surfaces venerated by millions who each year pay homage to these “plaster saints.”

The Cultural Politics of the Maximato and the International Left Resignifying Porfirian Palaces: A “National Mausoleum”? In his drive to “institutionalize” the revolution, why did Calles erect a palace for the people? What were the political risks and benefits of engaging in such an oxymoronic gambit? Why were murals enlisted to reconcile these contradictions? And, conversely, how did these contradictions affect the practice and reception of mural art? Like that of so many of Mexico’s cultural institutions, the history of the Palace of Fine Arts reflects the country’s tumultuous past. Its antecedent institution was the Santa Anna Theater, inaugurated in 1844 and demolished in 1901 to make way for a new national theater commissioned by dictator Porfirio Díaz. The Italian architect Adamo Boari was secured for the job. Boari envisioned the national theater as a “Porfirian center of culture” located in the heart of the burgeoning cosmopoli-

tan capital of Mexico City.4 In keeping with this auspicious vision, the theater was relocated along the east end of the Alameda Park and due west of the Metropolitan Cathedral. This orientation placed the Palace on axis with the city’s historic center, linking its cultured zone of leisure to the seat of federal power (see p. 28). Boari wanted the new theater to rival Garnier’s opera house in Paris while still conveying Mexican national attributes.5 Therefore, he used sculptural adornment to design an elaborate decorative cycle inspired by Mexican motifs: coyote masks, eagle warriors, maguey plants, serpents, and so forth.6 For the auditorium, he commissioned Tiffany’s of New York to build a cantilevered stained-­glass curtain depicting a panoramic view of the Valley of Mexico based on a painting by Dr. Atl.7 The edifice testifies to the Francophilia of the Porfiriato while simultaneously codifying the Creole indigenismo that postrevolutionary artists would radicalize.8 The new national theater was to have been inaugurated as part of the centennial celebration commemorating Mexican independence scheduled for 1921. However, construction was interrupted in 1913 because of the upheaval of the revolution.9 Once the fighting subsided, President Venustiano Carranza (1917–20) appointed Antonio Muñoz to resume building in 1919, but this initiative stalled. In 1928, Eduardo Hory, secretary of communications and public works, formed a committee and public subscription campaign to finish construction, but this too was halted in 1931. The following year, Alberto J. Pani, minister of housing and public credit, was charged with assessing the project to determine if it should be salvaged or abandoned altogether. After almost thirty years and a total cost of thirteen million pesos, the foundation and exterior had been partially completed but the steel framework of the central dome was still exposed, silhouetted against A Palace for the People  27

Alameda Central

Hacia Monumento a la Revolucion

Rep. de Brasil

Av Hidalgo

Rep. de Chile

Bolivar Allende

Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas

rm a efo od el aR Pa se

N

Tacuba

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Cathedral

Templo Mayor

5 de Mayo Av Juarez

Hemiciclo a Juarez

Torre Latino

National Palace

Francisco I. Madero Zocalo 16 de Septiembre Venustiano Carranza Rep. de Uraguay

Mexico City, with the Alameda, the historic center, the Paseo de la Reforma, and major monuments indicated

the sky.10 Pani suggested scaling down the original plan and converting the national theater into “the seat of a national institution of artistic character.”11 “Let us make due with what we have for the entertainment of all the people,” he argued. “The shell has integrated itself into the skyline and we are now in the process of integrating its inner workings into the man of today.”12 He secured the architect Federico E. Mariscal to finish the building.13 Upon its completion, the Palace was placed under the direction of the SEP’s Department of Fine Arts.14 In order for the Palace to fulfill the purpose of public education, Pani recommended the inclusion of a museum that would exhibit the best work of Mexican artists along with some representatives of the European schools that had influenced its development. Through these educational displays, he argued, the Palace would exert a powerful influence on a “public whose ignorance in matters of 28   A Palace for the People

the plastic arts is frequently manifested in a mixture of incomprehension and underappreciation of the pictorial works of our days.”15 It was a lack of aesthetic training, he posited, that had made Mexicans unable to appreciate modern Mexican art. This, in turn, was a hindrance to the ethical development of the population and, therefore, to national progress. For Pani and other social planners of the day, aesthetic development was the responsibility of both the state and its citizenry. “If the state accepts its moral obligation to safeguard high culture,” he wrote, “our constitution tacitly entrusts the same responsibility to the citizen.”16 Pani’s homily to the self-­edifying citizen was calculated to rationalize the public subscriptions still required to offset the enormous costs of completing this federal institution—an estimated six million pesos more than had already been spent.17 Betraying an evident anxiety about the specter of Porfirian excess haunting the contemporary re-

animation of its unfinished palaces, the rhetoric surrounding this project emphasized again and again the revolutionary character and civic virtue of fine art. Thus when President Abelardo Rodríguez (1932–34) inaugurated the building before a crowd of more than 20,000 onlookers, he praised it as a “center of cultural divulgation, [and] one of the basic points of the revolutionary program.”18 He was responding, in particular, to insinuations by the press that the Palace augured a return to the elitist pretensions of the Porfiriato. The headline in Excélsior proclaimed: “Today the Fatuous Palace of Fine Arts Will Be Inaugurated.”19 The following day, the paper praised the building as a “miracle of marble” that compensated for the “dictatorship of cement” that characterized modern architecture. However, the prose is punctuated with phrases like “impressive grandiosity” and “opulent beauty” that reveal the daily’s penchant for the lost “splendor” and “magnificence” of “our cultivated capital” as well as its skepticism about the current political environment.20 This ambivalent praise demonstrates that members of the public understood the genealogy of the Palace. And while the dailies equivocated, the avant-­garde was overtly hostile. Francisco Reyes Palma describes a protest penned by former members of the avant-­garde group the Estridentistas, in which the signatories decried the resurrection of the Porfirian project as “a shameful symbol, [and] dictatorial inheritance, the recuperation of which establishe[s] a regressive and sumptuary cultural orientation.”21 Similarly, the leftist League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios [lear]) debuted the first issue of its journal Frente a Frente in November of 1934 with a pointed attack on this “National Mausoleum” on its cover (figure 4). Leopoldo Méndez’s print satirizes the authoritarian nature of the postrevolutionary government and the ideological role of cultural popu-

4 Leopoldo Méndez, Calaveras of the National Mausoleum, wood block print, cover illustration for first issue of Frente a Frente, November 1934

lism in its assent. He depicts Rivera and Carlos Riva Palacio, head of the pnr, applauding a performance of Carlos Chávez’s proletarian symphony Llamadas (The Calls) while two diminutive peasants are expelled from the theater by an armed guard, a reference to the actual police dispersal of the “human avalanche” of non-­ticketed citizens who “claimed their right of access” to this public institution on opening day.22 Equating the government and its official party with Nazism, he attacks the cynical use of revolutionary populism as a form of political demagoguery. During the Maximato the consolidation of federal power was symbolized in the architectural improvements of the capital city. Undertaking the A Palace for the People  29

5 Carlos Obregón Santacilia (architect) and Oliverio Martínez

(sculptor), Monument to the Revolution, 1938

construction of new hospitals, schools, and public housing, the presidents sought to visually manifest the rhetoric of the revolution on the public landscape.23 However, political and economic power was concentrated within a small elite comprised of politicians and military caudillos as well as local businessmen such as Alberto J. Pani, Aarón Sáenz, and Miguel Alemán who had profited from the chaos of the civil war. These men grew rich from the sale and development of private real estate holdings in their capacity as government functionaries charged with overseeing public projects throughout Mexico City.24 30   A Palace for the People

The Palace of Fine Arts was therefore more than a cultural institution. It was the fulcrum in a symbolic landscape of power. Located along the Alameda, it was oriented toward not only the Porfirian Paseo de la Reforma but also the new Paseo de la Revolución. A business corridor, the Paseo de la Revolución provides a ritual procession to the Monument to the Revolution, another civic project salvaged from the remains of Díaz’s unfinished Palace of Legislative Power (figure 5). The Palace of Fine Arts, Monument to the Revolution, and Paseo were all of a piece. However, unlike the monument and Paseo, the Palace was tainted by

its association with the excesses of the nineteenth-­ century dictatorship. While its exterior extravagance could not be rectified with a series of socialist sculptural adornments, as had been the case with the monument, its interior could proclaim the democratic orientation of the new state through the inclusion of mural art. In this way, the Palace underwent a process of resignification, allowing the postrevolutionary regime to reclaim the Porfirian dream of progress, but obfuscating its authoritarianism by harnessing the populism of this revolutionary art to its cause. Orozco was invited to execute a fresco for the third-­floor balcony at the west end of the central atrium, and Rivera was granted the east balcony directly opposite to re-­create his recently destroyed mural at Rockefeller Center in New York. These highly public commissions represented the first step in the official restructuring of what had been an experimental and ad hoc movement by the new political regime. Each artist had left Mexico frustrated by the public’s hostility and diminishing state support, and the return of federal patronage presented both opportunity and bitter irony. The Maximato had co-­opted the rhetoric of popular revolution that muralism had helped to codify, and now a once ambivalent state was eager to have radical artists decorate its new buildings as testimony to these values. For the muralists, however, there was still work to be done through monumental public art. Orozco still sought a Mexican audience and public approbation after nearly a decade of exile. For him, a prominent federal commission represented belated vindication in his homeland. Likewise, the opportunity to go head to head with his archrival, Rivera, could not be passed up. While Orozco always maintained that his approach to monumental art was superior to what he deemed to be Rivera’s nationalist kitsch, he was personally wounded by Rivera’s fame at home and abroad.

Moreover, he would use his Palace commission to critique the political hypocrisy of the postrevolutionary government. Rivera, on the other hand, had enjoyed steady federal patronage throughout his sojourn north. While he was no stranger to painting in government buildings, the Palace commission provided an opportunity for him to redress his critics on the Left and enact his revenge against the capitalists in the United States who had destroyed his mural for Rockefeller Center. In New York City the mural had been embroiled in a heated battle over corporate patronage and the creative rights of public artists. In Mexico City his Palace fresco became the focal point for a critical debate over mural art’s relationship with a patently corrupt political regime. Artists had always maintained that a revolutionary mural art could democratize its edifice by challenging its symbolic ideology with radical subject matter. Furthermore, by finding creative formal solutions to problems posed by architectural eccentricities, their frescos could over-­code and thus reclaim even the most authoritarian building for the working and popular classes. However, the Palace of Fine Arts revealed, perhaps for the first time, the limits of representation for artists confronting a symbolically loaded edifice. Moreover, the Palace posed particularly difficult architectural challenges for mural artists. Its interior is structured around an open atrium with balcony-­like corridors around the periphery. The corridor walls afford vast expanses for fresco or paint. However, the space for viewing them is quite narrow. Furthermore, pink marble support columns positioned very close to the wall’s surface intrude upon the visual field from most vantage points. The east and west walls are visually divided into three sections by two columns. Consequently, both Rivera and Orozco devised a tripartite composition for their murals that was enA Palace for the People  31

hanced, or at the very least not inhibited, by this structural nuisance. Both artists worked in fresco on portable metal supports. While not permanently affixed to the walls, the murals nonetheless appear flush with their surface and thus give the impression of being permanent installations.25 These architectural constraints are important not only for how they impinged upon each artist’s conception but also for how they determine the viewer’s experience with the works by partially directing the movement of her body. The aesthetic politics of each commission is mobilized in part by the way the artist addresses an embodied viewer. And yet despite my use of the word “her,” the embodied viewer at the Palace is uncritically imagined and ritually structured as male through the murals on site. The institution’s formal appeal to an undifferentiated, and therefore abstract, viewing subject is consistently belied by the artists’ highly gendered iconography and frequent appeals to the male gaze through images of nude female bodies. This is, of course, typical of most modern art museums, as Carol Duncan has argued.26 However, even as the gendering of space at the Palace follows from the generic gender prescriptions of modernist art and leftist culture, it derives its specific contours from the sexual politics of Mexican nationalism. Moreover, as a single institutional space with consecutive individual commissions (rather than the multi-­artist collaborations or single-­artist cycles that characterize the federal commissions of the 1920s), the Palace was also a competitive arena in which male artists waged battle over the meaning and status of mural art. Thus, the particular articulations of gender in each mural provide insight into broader cultural discourses about national culture at discreet moments in postrevolutionary political history.

32   A Palace for the People

Engaging the Maximato: Orozco versus Rivera By 1933 both Orozco and Rivera had achieved international acclaim as modern artists. Rivera, in particular, was considered the best artist in the Americas and certainly the only artist from the region who was well known among the avant-­gardes in Europe. The murals painted by each in the 1920s had been negatively received by the Mexican public and all but abandoned by the state. However, by the early 1930s, it appeared as if they, and the experiment in public art that they represented abroad, were perhaps the postrevolutionary regime’s greatest achievement. Thus their Palace commissions signify not simply a renewal of state patronage but, more importantly, an attempt to reclaim muralism for Mexico. This inaugural gesture of reappropriation would be repeated with each subsequent commission. By accepting this invitation—for very different reasons—Orozco and Rivera established a precedent that made the Palace the public platform for engaging cultural politics, whether for critical or opportunistic reasons, or both. Orozco’s and Rivera’s Palace murals literally and metaphorically oppose one another. Rivera likened mural art to visual spectacle and openly embraced its propagandistic potential. His symmetrical compositional structure is rationally ordered and visually stable. Orozco’s dynamic symmetry, on the other hand, is visually disorienting. His vortical composition disrupts a complacent viewer by forcing her to confront the violence of modernity. Whereas Rivera encourages the viewer to read the mural’s political message, Orozco’s image induces a visceral response. Both express concerns about the worldwide depression and the rise of fascism. Each also responds to the social and political conditions of Mexico in the 1930s and, in particular, to the Palace’s place

6 José Clemente Orozco, Catharsis, 1934

within the Maximato’s cultural gambit. However, Rivera’s dialectical materialism differs profoundly from Orozco’s cyclical view of human history. Moreover, while Rivera used the Palace as a platform for promoting his career as a state-­supported artist, Orozco condemned the very civic project he had been commissioned to ornament. Orozco’s mural, Catharsis (1934), confronts the viewer with a purgatorial image of mechanical destruction and moral decay (figure 6). Its most prominent figure, a green-­hued prostitute, lies on her back just to the left of the fresco’s center. Foreshortened and positioned at a diagonal that draws the eye up from the base of the image, “La Chata,” as she is known, is a compositional device. Like a pornographic centerfold, she is splayed on a metallic bed against an orgiastic backdrop of agitated crowds, corrupt leaders, and the implements of industrialized labor and war. This nightmare vision spirals outward from a slightly off-­ center struggle between two anonymous men, one in the white-­collared shirt of the bourgeois businessman, the other naked, suggesting the pri-

mal force of the repressed popular classes. Orozco enhances the inherent dynamism of their leaning bodies with two jutting rifle butts in the extreme foreground that violently cleave the composition, establishing a centripetal vortex: a “center [that] cannot hold.”27 The mural casts a distinctly negative view on the worldwide rise of mass politics while implicating the class warfare in contemporary Mexico within this broader historical phenomenon. Orozco sets this scene against a flaming backdrop that suggests the purifying fires of destruction and renewal so characteristic of his cyclical vision of history.28 The artist remained resolute throughout his career that his painting addressed timeless themes, not contemporary political events. And Catharsis bears this out, as no single revolution or armed conflict has been indicated. Rather, it is the de-­individualizing nature of mass political movements as such that Orozco indicts. However, read within the context of its time, Catharsis reveals more local concerns than the artist was willing to admit.29 For example, the prostitute motif signifies A Palace for the People  33

generic social disorder, but it also invokes the corruption of the Maximato.30 Debates during this period over urban planning and economic development centered on the problem of prostitution, a state-­regulated labor sector and component of the tourist economy that the government sought to contain and exploit. In her study of prostitution in postrevolutionary Mexico City, Katherine Bliss argues that “over the 1930s the contradictory imperatives of moralization and development met head on,” resulting in the geographic and social stratification of sexual commerce.31 This stratification proceeded through the concentration of “low-­rent” prostitution in poor and working-­class neighborhoods while allowing “high-­class” bordellos and cabarets to flourish behind closed doors in more exclusive neighborhoods patronized by the city’s businessmen, politicians, and tourists. The distinction between “low” and “high” class depended upon the issue of public visibility, as the former designated women who “hung their bodies out of accesoria, or outbuilding, windows and . . . advertised their merchandise and low prices to passersby.”32 As Bliss demonstrates, debates over prostitution focused on promoting the moral and physical health of the nation while seeking ways to develop the economy. Legislators were caught between their desire to combat venereal disease and “redeem” young women and the need to exploit sex tourism to appease the social networks of a powerful elite involved in the hotel and entertainment industries. By incorporating the prostitute into his public commission, Orozco called attention to a particularly divisive and contentious component of urban renewal during the Maximato. Additionally, he drew on a potent trope of political satire circulating in tabloids and opposition papers that routinely critiqued the Calles administration’s graft and corruption by demonstrating its social and economic links with high-­ 34   A Palace for the People

class prostitutes.33 Conjuring prostitution in a very public venue, Orozco attacked the hypocrisy of social reform and postrevolutionary development during the Maximato for its perpetuation of Porfirian sins, namely, cronyism and social exploitation in pursuit of foreign capital. What are we to make of the effects of deploying the grotesque body of the prostitute to unmask the sexual politics of modernizing nationalism? Are not the terms of Orozco’s critique misogynist in effect, if not necessarily in intent? Certainly, Orozco was deeply insensitive to the violent implications of the construction of woman in the visual discourses of Mexican nationalism and aesthetic modernism. His use of the prostitute motif recycles a persistent binary in Western art: the Madonna, conceived of as an immaculate mother, and the sexually deviant whore. And in Mexico, this symbolic binary had a material equivalent in contemporary political struggles over national hygiene. When eugenicists, feminists, and policy makers colluded at the end of the 1930s to abolish state-­regulated prostitution, they did so in defense of “good motherhood.” Motherhood was the only acknowledged form of female citizenship. Consequently, the moral distinction between prostitutes and mothers was simultaneously political. Not only were prostitutes deemed unfit for maternal duties, but they were also, by virtue of their profession, categorized figuratively as non-­mothers.34 Thus even as Orozco challenged the moral hypocrisy of the Maximato, he accepted and naturalized its discriminatory sexual politics. La Chata is not a redeemed or redeemable figure but rather a sign of both the corruption of the modern world and the sexual hypocrisy of the Maximato. Orozco’s challenge to the cultural politics of the Maximato was overshadowed by the political theater surrounding Rivera’s commission. Moreover, his critique of mass politics seems to have gone unnoticed by artists on the Left. Members of

7 Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934

the avant-­garde refrained from attacking Orozco for his participation in this project and focused instead on Rivera’s commission and prominence as the regime’s favored artist. Rivera’s mural, alternately titled Man at the Crossroads and Man Controller of the Universe, is most commonly referred to as the Rockefeller mural (figure 7). Originally commissioned in 1933 by Nelson Rockefeller for the rca tower at Rockefeller Center, it was to have been the centerpiece of a three-­mural decorative cycle for the building’s main lobby. In the initial stages of the commission, Rivera was given one wall facing Fifth Avenue, just inside the lobby. His painting, along with two others by the British artist Frank Brangwyn and the Spaniard José Maria Sert, was to be executed in oil on canvas, using monotones of black and white.35 Rivera haggled over these original terms, ultimately gaining two more walls for adjoining images and the right to work in his preferred medium of fresco with a full-­ color palette.

The New York mural was therefore planned and executed as three distinct but thematically interrelated panels distributed around the three-­ sided armature of the elevator shaft.36 This contravened his patron’s desire for a monumental oil painting by turning the work into a mini-­mural cycle. The fresco medium as well as its engagement with the architecture maintained the muralists’ commitment to radicalizing their institutional supports. By executing a permanent work of art, Rivera intervened in rather than merely adorned the Rockefellers’ new corporate tower, a fact made readily apparent when the mural had to be destroyed, rather than relocated, after Rivera ran afoul of his patrons. The infamous controversy over the mural centered on Rivera’s refusal to remove a portrait of Lenin.37 The standoff between artist and patron catalyzed artists and journalists throughout the United States. Those sympathetic to the Rockefellers lambasted Rivera as a Communist. SupA Palace for the People  35

porters of Rivera argued that any concession to his patron’s request that he alter his mural would be a capitulation to censorship. Ultimately, the rights of private property prevailed over those of free speech. The mural was covered and eventually destroyed. Rivera was relieved of the commission with full pay. Fuming about the destruction of his work, Rivera vowed to repaint it as soon as an appropriate place was found. Searching for just such a space, he asked the Mexican government for a wall. They responded with the Palace commission, and this proved to be the perfect setting in which to resurrect his controversial mural. When Rivera re-­executed his mural in Mexico City, he was faced with a single wall roughly two-­ thirds the size of the original surface area. Consequently, he combined the three separate panels into a single mural with a tripartite compositional structure on a movable support that essentially realigned the work with oil painting—albeit on a monumental scale—rather than the epic cycles he had executed in government buildings throughout the 1920s.38 In this way, the architectural constraints of the Palace inadvertently accomplished what his capitalist patrons could not; they forced Rivera to abandon his commitment to the mural form in favor of a more conventional canvas-­like format.39 Likewise, this structural change had consequences for the mural’s iconographic program. In the original mural cycle, the central and most prominent wall represented human intelligence in control of the forces of nature. Its program was relatively consistent with the central portion of the Palace version, barring a few minor details (such as the addition of venereal disease microbes above the head of J. D. Rockefeller in the scene of reveling capitalists to the worker’s right). This is why a white worker still helms the controls of the macro- and microcosm despite the work’s relocation to Mexico. The program of the central panel 36   A Palace for the People

had always pertained to the concerns of the international proletariat, not those specific to Mexican labor. And Rivera’s Palace mural was still primarily involved in the internecine struggles of the international Left, even as it obliquely addressed Mexican society and politics. While the central panel remained the same, the meaning and iconography of the left and right panels changed significantly. In the New York version, the left panel presented “the liquidation of superstition,” and the right was reserved for “the emancipation of mankind through technology.”40 These flanking works were conceived as politically neutral explorations of the merits of science and technology. They expanded upon the themes elaborated by Sert and Brangwyn in adjacent works. Once the side panels were incorporated into the Manichean political logic structuring the central panel, however, these themes took on the negative and positive assignations of the left and right halves of the work’s program. Modern science and technology were folded into the historical opposition between fascism and communism. The “liquidation of superstition” would become an indictment of social Darwinism and the scientific racism fueling fascist tendencies in Europe and the United States. The “emancipation of mankind through technology” would become a celebration of Soviet society and an explicit endorsement of the Fourth International. Over time, this version would come to stand in for the destroyed cycle in subsequent accounts of the Rockefeller debacle, obscuring the many significant formal, material, and ideological differences between the two commissions.41 Rivera’s Palace mural is iconographically dense. Divided into three sections, the composition radiates out of a large central image in which a blond male worker is positioned at the controls of the forces of the natural and mechanical world. He is located at the center of two crossed ellipses depicting a telescopic image of the solar system

and images of microscopic disease microbes. To his right, capitalists revel as striking workers are beaten by riot squads. To his left, workers unite in proletarian solidarity and celebrate their labor in a vast May Day parade. In the Palace version, the central figure mediates laterally between the threat of capitalism, represented by the United States, and the promise of socialism, represented by the Soviet Union. But Rivera also figures a hemispheric relation along the mural’s north-­south axis. In this sense, he symbolizes the industrial laborer of the north who draws his power from the telluric forces and natural resources of the south. The indigenous fruits and vegetables that grow out of the vaginal folds of the earth below him are indexes of Mexico’s agricultural abundance. Rivera had long associated the Mexican landscape with the female body, and he routinely depicted the exploitation of natural resources through the gendered discourse of conquest and colonization. Thus in this mural, he subtly sutures man’s control of nature through technology into the allegories of romance and rape that structure Mexican national identity while attempting to recuperate such sexualized exploitation of the land by industry through a bid for socialist control. In fact, throughout the mural, gendered tropes of degeneration and reproductivity render the political opposition between capitalism and socialism as a choice between disease microbes and decadence and fertility and hygienic athleticism. To the viewer’s right, procreation and breast-­feeding adumbrate the compendium of masculine labor surrounding Lenin, where, in addition to the revolutionary trio of farmer, soldier, and worker, we also find nursing mothers and their children. These allusions to female fertility are not incidental; women’s bodies were central to debates over national health and degeneration. As the symbolic site of racial purity, the female body

was the primary target of eugenic legislation in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico and the United States.42 Thus like Orozco’s critique of the class politics and moral hypocrisy of the Maximato, Rivera’s mural rearticulates the eugenic logic and gendered terms of postrevolutionary mestizaje even as he endorses the putative sexual equality of a socialist utopia. In his Palace commission, women are lauded for their reproductive capacities. Their place in the proletarian utopia he depicts is first and foremost as mothers. Conversely, the capitalists’ female companions are represented as nonreproductive, a point driven home by the venereal disease microbes floating above their heads. Moving out from the central image, we see two monumental statues framing the entire composition. While both represent the waning of religious authority under the influence of science and technology, they are also reminders of the powerful role of visual culture in political oppression. Rivera added a rosary to the figure at the extreme left of the composition when he repainted the fresco in Mexico. The Christian cross reiterates Marx’s denigration of religion as “the opiate of the masses,” but it also refers to the recent Cristiada (the Cristero War) and thus tacitly endorses Calles’s anti-­clerical stance. At the opposite end of the composition, a beheaded god clutches a Greek column adorned with a swastika, recalling the Nazi appropriation of antiquity and the role of monumental art in the visual rhetoric of fascism. In this way, he crafts capitalist societies as simultaneously fascist in their authoritarian use of media. Rivera was cognizant of the manipulation of mass culture in fascist regimes.43 In Man at the Crossroads, he strikes a balance between celebrating the liberatory potential of mass communication and cautioning against its potential use for evil.44 The entire mural is a meditation on the power of the electronic media to inform and influence the public. And as Robert Linsley has shown, A Palace for the People  37

Rivera’s call for a public rather than privatized mass media was a direct response to the mural’s original setting at the Rockefellers’ new communications complex.45 For Rivera, fresco was a form of mass communication and political propaganda. Its potential for public access mirrored more modern technologies, and Rivera saw the RCA lobby as an important opportunity to make the case for the didactic power of his chosen medium. Likewise, upon his return to Mexico, he saw the Palace of Fine Arts as an equally important venue for this mural. As a public institution, the Palace charged no admission fee. Given the low rates of literacy and nascent development of radio, the Palace was no more or less exclusive than other communication media of the day. While limited to a mainly urban audience, Rivera’s political message would nonetheless be broadcast to the Mexican citizens who visited this institution. And yet, as Leopoldo Méndez’s print for Frente a Frente suggests, many in the Mexican avant-­garde viewed Rivera’s use of the national popular in a Calles project as the equivalent of artists working for Hitler or Mussolini. At the same time, David Alfaro Siqueiros would argue that Rivera’s fresco technique and conventional style eschewed any attempt to grapple with the profound impact of the mass media on contemporary viewers or its frightening manipulation by fascist political regimes. In his biography of Rivera, Bertram Wolfe argues that Rivera substituted Lenin for an “anonymous labor leader” to emphasize his communism in response to constant attacks from the American Communist Party for being a “painter for millionaires.”46 His desire to repaint the fresco in Mexico was likewise a response to the attacks there that charged him with being a “painter of palaces.”47 The portrait of Lenin became an index of these struggles. When he sacrificed his mural for it, he regained some credibility among American art38   A Palace for the People

ists on the Left. When he repainted the fresco in Mexico, Lenin’s visage reminded audiences of his martyrdom, casting his Palace mural as a radical work of political art (a status it enjoys to this day). While this benefited his federal patrons, it did not win over his artistic peers. On the contrary, his attempt to curry favor with both the Left and the state sparked a contentious public debate over the viability of muralism as a revolutionary art.

“The Battle of the Century”: Rivera versus Siqueiros Despite the political regime’s desire for overtly nationalist themes, the murals it got were more concerned with international politics and only obliquely addressed their Mexican public. And yet Rivera’s mural served the interests of the Maximato quite well. For this reason, his work for the state as a “painter of palaces” prompted his peer Siqueiros to call for an end to the first phase of mural art. Central to this call was a reevaluation of mural art’s dependence upon architecture and the use of conventional realism and traditional media. Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s debate was framed politically by the threat posed by fascism as well as the aesthetic restrictions imposed by Stalin on social realism. The aesthetic positions elaborated by each artist would not only make the practice of muralism central to interwar discourse on the politics of art but also have profound effects on the subsequent development of the second phase of mural art. Part of the international struggle between orthodox Stalinists and renegade Trotskyites, this debate marked a new phase in the development of Mexican muralism. The Palace would serve as venue for what one critic called the “battle of the century.”48 Rivera had been a prominent member of the Communist Party until 1929, when he was

expelled. Over the 1930s, Rivera aligned himself politically and artistically with Leon Trotsky. This further alienated him from the Communist Party in Mexico and his former colleagues in the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters, and Sculptors. When he repainted his Rockefeller mural at the Palace, he exaggerated the Red sympathies that had caused such a stir in New York by turning what was originally a generic May Day parade into a direct appeal for the Fourth International.49 He added portraits of Trotsky, Marx, Engels, Jay Lovestone (the leader of the Lovestonites, the opposition Communist Party of the USA), and his biographer Bertram Wolfe holding a banner that proclaims: “Workers of the World Unite with the Fourth International!” By declaring his allegiance with Trotsky, Rivera demonstrated his freedom from party dogma while still maintaining his commitment to socialist politics and revolution. This distinction suited his patrons well. From its inception, the pnr had promoted itself as a populist party and actively negotiated political alliances with the nation’s myriad peasant organizations and workers’ unions. However, it had never espoused a communist line. In early 1934, the Communist Party was operating underground because of the repressive policies of the Maximato.50 And while Lázaro Cárdenas was campaigning in the countryside with promises to take the pnr in a more radical and populist direction, both he and the ruling party were viewed as proto-­fascist by the Communist Party.51 Behind the scenes, Calles and Riva Palacio, among other party officials, sought to discipline Cárdenas to maintain control of the Maximato. But by the end of the year, Cárdenas would bring Calles’s proxy presidency to a close and reform the official party.52 Cárdenas would eventually broker an ambiguous relationship with the Communist Party by easing up on the repression meted out by

his predecessor, but also effectively sidelining the party from participation within the pnr.53 Within this tense political environment, Rivera’s federal patrons cynically recognized the value of publicly endorsing his censored mural. His Trotskyism provided the perfect political face for a purportedly populist state that wanted the radical valence of socialism without endorsing the official Communist Party. However, artists aligned with the Communist Party recognized that the opportunism went both ways. Recall that Méndez inscribed Rivera’s forehead with the phrase “IVth International” and decorated his chair with a dollar sign in his satirical print for Frente a Frente. He depicts Rivera comfortably enthroned with pnr boss Riva Palacio in the newly inaugurated Palace of Fine Arts, thereby making the relationship between Rivera’s political orientation and his lucrative state commissions obvious. Moreover, Méndez’s inclusion of a swastika reveals that he endorsed the Communist Party’s view that the ruling party was indeed fascist in its manipulation of revolutionary nationalism for anti-­populist political gains. The Palace commission and the political currency Rivera was able to generate from the Rockefeller debacle instigated the first of many public disputes between mural artists over the success of muralism as a revolutionary art and the direction the movement should take. The dispute began in May of 1934, when David Alfaro Siqueiros published an attack on Rivera in the New Masses. In his article “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” Siqueiros reiterates complaints he had been making since 1931. Siqueiros diagnosed Rivera’s failures as symptomatic of the broader tendencies of the mural movement and the revolution itself. Arguing that the popular uprising had been administered by the petit bourgeoisie, Siqueiros charged that all the artists associated with the Mexican renaissance, himself included, had perA Palace for the People  39

petuated the “utopian confusionism” and “opportunism” of its “anarchic chauvinism.”54 Siqueiros enumerated Rivera’s sins: he was at heart a bohemian rather than revolutionary artist; his indigenismo reflected a touristic and nationalist mentality rather than the international orientation he proclaimed; he painted indoors in elite and government buildings, “places completely removed from the traffic of the masses”; and his medium— fresco—was anachronistic rather than innovative and thereby “useless . . . for purposes of the art of propaganda [as well as] the conditions of modern construction.”55 Siqueiros’s most damning criticism, however, was that Rivera had consistently allied himself with a reactionary government. To substantiate these claims, Siqueiros noted that Rivera dominated state commissions, and that in order to safeguard his mural career, he “continued with the ebb and flow of official Mexican demagogy,” effectively giving the government, foreign tourists, and the international bourgeoisie “pseudo-­Marxist lectures” that never commented on the “precise political moment.”56 Siqueiros characterized Rivera’s portrait of Lenin in the Rockefeller mural as a belated political gesture calculated to enlist the Lovestoneites and Trotskyites in a “counterrevolutionary unity” against the Communist Party and in defense of his art. As proof of his political mendacity, Siqueiros noted that Rivera would soon return to Mexico “to work for the Government, and to shout in the Yellow governmental demonstration for the Fourth International.”57 Referring to the Palace commission, Siqueiros argued that Rivera’s repainted mural was yet another step on his “counter-­revolutionary road.” However, rather than viewing this as the product of an opportunistic personality alone, he argued that it was the natural outcome of the many failures of the Mexican mural project’s utopian origins. Thus he ended his attack with a call for a new phase of collective 40   A Palace for the People

public art, one that had learned from the mistakes of the first phase but would continue muralism’s revolutionary path. Initially, Rivera met Siqueiros’s attack with silence, preferring to continue his career above the fray of leftist name-­calling. However, a little over a year later, he conspired with Siqueiros to stage a public debate before thousands at the Palace of Fine Arts.58 On 26 August 1935, Rivera gave a public lecture on “The Arts and Their Revolutionary Role in Culture” in a session on “The Arts in Mexican Schools” at the North American Conference of the New Education Fellowship, a six-­day congress sponsored by the sep.59 The following day, Siqueiros used his speaking opportunity to rearticulate his attack from the New Masses of a year earlier. Rivera, surprised by the sharply personal nature of Siqueiros’s comments, stood up mid-­ attack and demanded the opportunity to reply to each of Siqueiros’s points and even waved a pistol at one point in a dramatic defense of his honor.60 What began as political theater devolved into farce as the two performers became increasingly strident as the debate wore on. The following afternoon, the dispute ensued before 1,000 onlookers. Emanuel Eisenberg, covering the conference for the New Masses, wrote, “Mexico is probably the only country in the world where a controversial meeting of two painters, in much less than a day’s notice, could be calculated to attract a thousand people. In an overwhelmingly illiterate country pictures perform the most immediate communication in the arts, and the tradition carries through to the intellectual world.”61 At 4:30, standing on the balcony in the central atrium of the Palace, Siqueiros reiterated his case and Rivera responded in turn. Rivera conceded some of Siqueiros’s points but argued that they were the natural consequences of his material conditions.62 If the revolution had in fact been a petit-­bourgeois one, then of course the art

would reflect this; he did paint indoors and for bourgeois patrons, but hadn’t Lenin argued that artists should bore from within? Siqueiros, he asserted, was not taking into account the large public festivals that took place at many government buildings; therefore, his argument that Rivera’s frescos were unavailable to the masses was invalid. Rivera defended his use of fresco by noting that the murals Siqueiros had painted outdoors and with experimental techniques in Los Angeles were already deteriorating. Furthermore, he turned Siqueiros’s attacks on his subject matter around, noting that his accuser had painted angels in his Preparatory School murals and a crucifixion on Olvera Street in Los Angeles. Siqueiros, he concluded, was motivated by personal jealousy over Rivera’s success at home and abroad. Capitalizing on Siqueiros’s lack of federal patronage, Rivera suggested that they let the masses judge their works. Rivera knew that his younger peer had yet to execute a public mural in Mexico that reflected his political convictions. Rivera’s domination of federal commissions meant that his frescos were more readily available than Siqueiros’s unfinished images at the Prepa or his experiments abroad. Likewise, Rivera was aware of the fact that without public commissions, Siqueiros had not had the chance to develop his style and practice on a monumental scale the way he and Orozco had. Thus the artist’s professional jealousy was directly related to Rivera’s success as an official artist. Nonetheless, when Rivera published his reply, he concluded by stating his desire to continue to collaborate on their shared revolutionary goals, even though up until that point Siqueiros had succeeded only in “talking” while Rivera had been contributing with “painting.”63 The dispute resumed at the lear headquarters and continued for another five days. It concluded with Rivera publicly signing a series of “confessions” drawn up by Siqueiros affirming his

criticisms of the movement and pledging to work toward new forms of collective art.64 Among these confessions was the admission that “art has served the demagogic interests of the government more than the interests of the campesinos and workers,” and that “it has been an error to realize murals almost exclusively in the interiors of grand buildings.”65 The final point asserted that the failures of mural art followed from the “deficiencies” of its artists’ revolutionary politics, and in particular their desire to find beautiful architecture for their painting rather than strategic locales.66 In addition to arguing for greater technical experimentation and the development of portable forms of art and propaganda, both artists reaffirmed the revolutionary nature of mural art. Above all, muralism’s mandate was to reconcile the aesthetic with the political avant-­garde for the socialist liberation of Mexico’s peasants and workers. With this critical self-­assessment, a decade into the movement, mural art’s two most prominent Marxist practitioners openly acknowledged the extent to which muralism had been shaped and even co-­opted by the postrevolutionary state.67 It is significant, however, that both artists attributed muralism’s failures to the political and economic conditions of the immediate postrevolutionary period. Each acknowledged that the material conditions of production were a crucial part of their inability to bring about a truly revolutionary public art. That is, they offered a Marxist critique of the first phase of mural art as part of the material dialectic of history. By midcentury, Octavio Paz would significantly retool this argument by psychologizing their failure as part of Mexico’s existential struggle to achieve modernity. In Paz’s hands the first phase of mural art is reconstituted as part of a spiritual dialectic that seeks to transcend the particular and achieve the status of a universal. Rivera’s pledge did nothing to change his A Palace for the People  41

style or practice. Siqueiros, however, took the Marxist-­Leninist mandate to make mural art useful to the masses seriously. In his debate with Rivera, Siqueiros articulated an inchoate critique of his rival’s narrative style and its effect on the viewer that would inform his subsequent experiments with the mural device. Referring to Rivera’s recently completed Portrait of America, a sequence of portable frescos he painted with his severance pay from the Rockefellers, Siqueiros describes the cycle as “painting conceived for the static contemplation of the parasite or of the elite. And in no way, functional equivalence of the revolutionary spectator, of the mass-­spectator. . . . And what about the subject-­matter? The chronological itinerary will answer us.”68 Rivera’s Portrait of America offered a highly telescoped history of the Americas, narrated chronologically from the conquest through the current political and economic crisis. What is of interest here is Siqueiros’s choice of the term “chronological itinerary” to describe the mural. With this phrase he echoes his characterization of Rivera as a “mental tourist” traipsing through the Americas without any real connection to the material conditions of the people and subjects he treats. But Siqueiros also reminds us that Rivera’s mural cycles are intentionally structured as chronological and historical travelogues that turn the viewer’s stroll through institutions such as the sep into ritual processions in which the viewing subject is placed at a comfortable and “contemplative” distance from what she sees.69 Siqueiros’s persistent attacks on the “microscopic” detail of Rivera’s iconography, and especially his use of packed compositions filled with “figures, banners, etc.,” reveal yet another important concern regarding the immobilizing effects of this kind of art. Siqueiros implies that only literate viewers in possession of the “aesthetic gaze” could possibly make sense of these works. Only 42   A Palace for the People

they would have the requisite training to stand back and quietly unpack the “confused” messages in each panel. All other viewers would require some kind of authoritative mediation. Thus, Rivera’s murals lend themselves to a top-­down dispensing of information in which the viewing subject has no real interpretive agency. It is for this reason that Siqueiros routinely refers to Rivera as “demagogic.”70 In an age of mass politics and spectacle, Siqueiros argues, Rivera’s fresco technique and “chronological itineraries” are ineffective as vehicles for mobilizing the viewing subject because his inert aesthetic imposes conceptual and physical constraints on the viewer. To combat this, Siqueiros calls for the development of a more affective style and a more dynamic medium. Siqueiros would formalize this critique by the end of the 1930s, and it would come to structure the elaboration of his dialectical style over the next decade. However, in 1934 he was just beginning to work out his position in written commentary and painted form. And at this point, his critique of Rivera as well as his experiments with technique and the realist idiom was more motivated by the epic battles over “revolutionary art” within the international Marxist Left than his nascent concerns about the Mexican state’s cultural program.

Retooling the Mural Device: Siqueiros’s Dialectic-­Subversive Painting As a consequence of his debate with Rivera, Siqueiros embarked upon a period of experimentation throughout the Americas that culminated in his triumphant return to Mexico and a sequence of commissions at the Palace of Fine Arts. Why, given his trenchant critique of Rivera’s work for the Mexican government, would Siqueiros consent to becoming a “painter of palaces” him-

self? Furthermore, how would his participation in this state project affect not only the direction of his work but also the critical perception of the first generation of mural art? Siqueiros’s critique of the institutionalization of mural art by the postrevolutionary state was more than a self-­serving posture. He had been pointing out for a decade the ideological limits of what he called Rivera’s “Mexican curio,” and he would continue his experiments with alternative methods and techniques begun in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires when he left for New York in 1936 to open his Experimental Workshop.71 His work from 1934 until the end of the decade must be understood within the context of the splintering of the Marxist Left and in particular the challenge posed by Leon Trotsky and André Breton in their attack on Stalin’s prescriptions for revolutionary art. Moreover, Siqueiros’s attempts to retool the mural device in accordance with communist ideology while maintaining a commitment to both realism and experimentation was a direct response to Rivera’s period embrace of Trotsky, signaled by Rivera’s willingness to claim authorship on Trotsky’s behalf when he and Breton published their 1938 manifesto, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.”72 Allying themselves with the surrealists against Stalin’s “totalitarian regime,” Trotsky and Breton renounced the Soviet Comintern’s attempts to dictate artistic content and style and advocated instead “complete freedom for art.”73 They (with Rivera’s endorsement) insisted that creative acts were inherently political, because the “natural course” of the “individual spirit” is toward the “emancipation of man.”74 They argued that the freedom to create according to one’s “own inner world” is an essential precondition for any political struggle for freedom.75 Rather than conforming his practice to some external dictate, the true revolutionary artist “subjectively assimilates [the revo-

lution’s] social content” in his art.76 Thus, surrealist experiments in automatic drawing and chance operations, as mechanisms for eluding the aesthetic prescriptions of the conscious mind, were deemed “revolutionary” in both form and content. While Rivera never really embraced surrealism per se, the ideas he helped to articulate in this manifesto would have an enormous impact on artists throughout the Western world. Post– World War II artists and critics would embrace the psychoanalytic argument that experimental painting, especially in its non-­objective forms, was sublimated politics. Moreover, their attack on the Soviet Union and Stalinist realism would help to cast all forms of political realism as totalitarian art. This would have dire consequences for the Mexican school of painting on the international stage. However, in the 1930s, this was not yet clear, nor was the only option for an artist to choose between realism and some emergent form of abstraction. Rather, as Siqueiros’s response to his debate with Rivera reveals, artists could still embrace an overtly politicized realism while also experimenting with form and style. Mari Carmen Ramírez tracks the development of Siqueiros’s “dialectic-­subversive” painting over the decade of the 1930s and situates his labors to activate the wall within the international avant-­garde’s attempts to grapple with the implications of mass media for art and politics.77 She argues that Siqueiros’s “inclination toward a monumental art based on its emotional affinities with the spectator” culminates in the 1939–40 stairwell mural at the Electricians’ Syndicate headquarters, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie.78 A thoroughly working-­ class location, the syndicate headquarters would finally bring Siqueiros’s radical vision of public art to the masses. Here, he brought the technical revolution he’d begun in Los Angeles and perfected in New York in his Experimental Workshop home to Mexico City. A Palace for the People  43

In Portrait of the Bourgeoisie Siqueiros employed novel techniques and materials such as photographic projection, spray guns, nitrocellulose pigments, and photomontage on a monumental scale. Through the creation of a team of artists (the group included Antonio Pujol, Luis Arenal, Josep Renau, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Miguel Prieto, Roberto Berdecio, and Fanny Rabel), he enacted his belief that mural art must be collective in its production as well as its reception.79 Finally, the team’s dynamic use of the stairwell space created a cinematic experience in which a moving subject-­spectator would activate the mural’s continuous composition through her ascent. Ramírez argues that in this way, Siqueiros applied Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical approach to film form and his theory of “emotional dynamization” to the formerly static medium of painting.80 Like Walter Benjamin, Siqueiros sought to confront the fascist “aestheticization of politics” with the socialist “politicization of art.”81 And to do this, he argued, mural art needed to harness the appeal of mass media by employing cinematic techniques to create a “cinematographic mural paradigm.”82 In this respect, Siqueiros’s mural art represents one of the most radical attempts among Western artists to create an art that was truly avant-­garde in both its form and content. Jennifer Jolly has definitively demonstrated that the Electricians’ Syndicate mural was collective in the ideological sense, if not consistently so in practice.83 As she notes, Siqueiros assumed a leadership position within the team from the very start, allocating supporting roles to his colleagues and at times painting over their work. While Siqueiros’s original conception of the mural’s iconography was significantly altered by Renau (who completed the project after Siqueiros was exiled for his role in the assassination attempt on Trotsky), the ideological dedication to teamwork, use of technology, and decision to activate the stair44   A Palace for the People

well space rather than use a flat wall were driven by Siqueiros’s critique of the first phase of mural art as represented by both Rivera and Orozco at the Palace of Fine Arts. Just as Rivera’s Palace mural was a public endorsement of Trotsky’s Fourth International and, by extension, his views on the independence of artists from the Soviet Comintern, the Electricians’ Syndicate mural was Siqueiros’s attempt to demonstrate the aesthetic possibilities for leftist art rooted in communist orthodoxy. If the squabbles within the Popular Front lent Siqueiros’s position a sense of political urgency, what matters in the long term are its implications for his developing mural practice as well as the critical assessment of the first generation of mural art by less sympathetic figures like Octavio Paz. Even though he was unable to complete Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, Siqueiros was finally able to bring his alternative vision of mural art to fruition. However, he still sought a way to put his cinematographic paradigm in direct confrontation with the mural art of his peers, in particular Rivera. This opportunity would come in 1944 when Siqueiros was invited to execute the first of two mural cycles for the Palace of Fine Arts. The architectural constraints of the Palace’s interior would force Siqueiros, like Rivera before him, to translate the spatial dynamism of three dimensions to the representational space of a two-­dimensional surface. The Palace commissions represent Siqueiros’s canonization as one of the “three greats” of Mexican mural art. However, we should not view this only as co-­optation by a state apparatus seeking to incorporate another revolutionary artist during the politically and economically perilous wartime years. Siqueiros’s willingness to become an official artist was due to his own convictions about the radical emotive potential of mural art to effect political agency. Taking up Rivera’s call to let the masses decide Siqueiros would execute a series

of murals at the Palace that visualized his alternative to Rivera’s “traditional bohemianism” and his “backward” fresco technique.84 Hanging side by side, the works of los tres grandes could now be compared by the public. Far from a simple bid for official favor, Siqueiros’s commissions represent his attempts to combat the “Mexican curio” in paint rather than talk. The Palace was therefore the logical place for this visual confrontation; its status as the official site of national culture made it a necessary battlefield in the struggle over revolutionary mural art. Like those of Orozco and Rivera, Siqueiros’s first Palace commission represented the artist’s triumphant return after an extended period abroad. Siqueiros had spent the prior four years in the United States after having been forcibly exiled for his affiliations with the Communist Party and suspected involvement in the assassination attempt on Trotsky in 1940. Mexico’s entry into the war in 1942, the alliance of the Soviet Union with the Allies in 1941, and Siqueiros’s work with the Popular Front did much to rehabilitate him in Mexico. During the war, the Mexican government pursued a policy of national unity by forging strategic alliances with right- and left-­wing factions within the party and among the opposition.85 Simultaneously, the value of Mexican resources—especially petroleum and labor—for the Allied effort significantly improved the economy, pulling the nation out of its depression and raising the level of employment.86 These wartime conditions enabled the state and ruling party to move away from Cárdenas’s national populism and agrarian reform toward a more conservative policy of industrial modernization and open embrace of bourgeois values. However, in 1944, the Mexican state and leftist artists were equally invested in aiding the war effort to secure a victory over fascism. Siqueiros’s first Palace commission ­reflects this convergence of interests. He inaugurated

Mexico for Democracy and Independence on 20 November 1944, the thirty-­fourth anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution (figure 8). This new painting was commissioned by the minister of public education, Jaime Torres Bodet, to coincide with an exhibition of Mexican painting around the theme of “the Drama of War” that he and Siqueiros were organizing at the Palace.87 Clearly both he and Siqueiros sought to position mural art within the contemporary wartime context in order to establish its ongoing relevance at home and abroad. The following year, Siqueiros added two portable works, Victims of War and Victim of Fascism (1945), to commemorate the Allied victory against the Axis powers (figures 9 and 10). The triptych was titled The New Democracy. The three monumental paintings are permanently installed along the north wall of the third-­ floor corridor connecting the east and west balconies that house Orozco’s and Rivera’s murals. Siqueiros considered The New Democracy to be a monumental painting rather than a mural proper.88 It did not radically confront or transform the surrounding architecture, and therefore it did not allow for the complex meanings of a work like Portrait of the Bourgeoisie. In this respect, Siqueiros acknowledged the limitations of the Palace for his mural practice while nonetheless proceeding with the commission. He did, however, use photo projection to achieve the sharp foreshortening of the figures and photographic studies of the wall’s dimensions to gauge and engage the various points of observation available to an ambulatory spectator within the narrow corridor of the Palace ­balcony. At center, a powerful allegorical woman wearing the Phrygian cap of liberty bursts forth from a volcanic landscape, the chains of bondage trailing behind her. In clenched fists, she grips freedom’s torch and the lily of peace, while her steely enemy lies vanquished below. Siqueiros implicates the spectator in the energetic composition A Palace for the People  45

8 David Alfaro Siqueiros, The New Democracy, 1944–45

through his polyangular perspectival system.89 Rather than receding into an illusory depth, his figure explodes through the painted surface, forcing the viewer to experience the mural physically and psychologically as she moves in front of it. This cinematic effect is enhanced by the narrow viewing space. From every point, the image dominates the viewer’s visual field. Instead of fresco or oil paint, Siqueiros used pyroxilin on Celotex and Masonite. He layered this synthetic medium on thick with a spray gun and air chisel, with hand-­painted passages as well. These industrial techniques of application give the surface a sculptural presence that further defies the traditional concept of painting as a window onto an illusionary world. The two pendent 46   A Palace for the People

works—Victims of War and Victim of Fascism— represent a mutilated man and a dead mother and child lying face down on cracked steps, signifying the anonymous victims and civilian casualties of political violence. Unlike the depiction of armed resistance at the Electricians’ Syndicate headquarters, Siqueiros’s Palace cycle employs conventional allegory and celebrates the liberal humanist values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Moreover, he casts the plight of humanity in highly conventional and gendered terms. The abstract value of democracy is gendered female through the traditional allegorical form of the fecund, naked, and desirable female body, while the forces of aggression are gendered male. The toppled fascist doubles as a conquistador, thereby configuring this universal

9 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Victims of War, 1944–45

10 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Victim of Fascism, 1944–45

lesson in veiled nationalist terms. Thus, we have here yet another rendition of the conquest as masculine domination of a feminized land, albeit with the power dynamic reversed. More significant, however, is the disturbing physicality of democracy’s body. On the one hand, Siqueiros disrupts the tradition of feminine allegory by using his wife, Angelica Arenal, as model (and in this respect he may have been seeking to outdo Rivera, who had modeled his famous nude figure of Mexico at Chapingo Agricultural School on his pregnant wife Lupe Marin).90 This figure is therefore both allegory and portrait. Siqueiros places a specific, identifiable woman in what is usually the location of anonymous, and thereby agent-­less, virtue. On the other hand, however powerful her body, it nonetheless recapitulates the psychosexual dynamics of the male gaze in its address to the viewer. While Siqueiros’s dynamic perspectival system literally moves viewers as they pass along the north wall corridor, the person of average height will find her head directly in line with democracy’s voluptuous breasts. The semi-­pornographic nature of this image is as surprising and even shocking to the viewer today as it must have been for viewers in the 1940s. However, sexual shock does not necessarily produce radical political effects, as so much of the avant-­garde art and popular culture of the twentieth century has demonstrated. In the end, despite his attempts to radicalize the allegorical tradition, Siqueiros added yet another nude female body to the Palace interior. The implicit gender dynamics of the subject-­object relationship that this kind of iconography establishes between painted figure and viewer can be complicated by the collaborative relationship between Siqueiros and his model-­wife, but it just as likely confirms and reconsolidates heteronormative gender relations. Despite this ambiguity, Siqueiros’s powerful image marks a consistent attempt on his part to

figure an active place for women within the highly gendered and masculinist postrevolutionary national imaginary. Whereas Orozco condemns the prostitute and Rivera lauds the mother, Siqueiros offers us something in between: an undecorous but desirable, dominant but objectified, named but allegorical female nude. While his subject matter ultimately resides within the tradition of allegory, Siqueiros’s dynamic handling of the wall’s surface and his innovative use of materials and techniques were designed to frustrate visual passivity and thereby to stimulate audiences into social action. In this respect The New Democracy directly confronts the Palace murals by Rivera and Orozco. Siqueiros argued that Orozco’s “aesthetic nihilism” and Rivera’s obscurantism resulted as much from a lack of technical innovation as from flaws in ideology. He asserted that Orozco’s subject matter and use of dynamic symmetry led to political cynicism, while Rivera’s required a “microscopic examination” that immobilized his audience before massive painted “lectures.”91 Clearly, given its gendered humanist allegories, The New Democracy succeeded as a demonstration of innovations in medium, form, and technique while failing as a radical work of revolutionary art.

The Cultural Politics of Alemanismo and the Cultural Cold War Consolidating Mexicanidad: The “People’s Palace” Becomes a Museum The symbolism and strategies Siqueiros employed in his The New Democracy reflected the convictions he articulated in the manifesto for his Center of Realist Modern Art, a cultural organ he created to unite artists against the myriad threats to modern Mexican painting, namely, fascism and depoliticized forms of “pure painting” that threatA Palace for the People  49

ened the cause of realism in the fight for social democracy. Siqueiros inaugurated the center in 1944 with a manifesto that reiterated his position on the need to combine innovative technique and socialist ideology.92 His attempts to generate a second phase of revolutionary art coincided, however, with a sharp shift away from the rhetoric of national populism on the part of the postrevolutionary state. Siqueiros remained steadfast in his convictions that mural art’s legacy was intimately linked with the popular revolution and ongoing liberatory struggles worldwide. The government, however, was modifying its cultural orientation. Rather than seeking to exploit the socialist claims of mural art, the postwar state worked to turn muralism into an official expression of Mexico’s unique contribution to Western culture, not a renegade example of local propaganda. Beginning with Miguel Alemán’s sexenio (1946–52), the state moved away from Cárdenas’s radical agrarianism and modified socialism toward industrialization, capital accumulation, and entry into the international order of modernity. Alemán solidified the authoritarian party structure that would dominate Mexican politics until the 1990s through a change in nomenclature. Cárdenas had signaled his populist rejection of the Maximato when he converted the National Revolutionary Party into the Party of the Mexican Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana). So in turn, Alemán signaled his corporatist rejection of Cárdenismo by turning the Party of the Mexican Revolution into the pri. As the first civilian president in postrevolutionary Mexico, Alemán’s administration signaled the end of the military’s domination of the party leadership and the coming to fruition of Calles’s call for a country of institutions rather than caudillos. A pro-­business lawyer, Alemán promoted modernization through the industrialization of Mexico City and the development of tourism, 50   A Palace for the People

ushering in a period of unprecedented economic growth and the emergence of a large middle class. This period, which extended until the 1960s, is known as the Mexican Miracle, and Alemán, the so-­called businessman president, was its greatest embodiment.93 His urban projects in the capital city, in particular the creation of University City (Ciudad Universitaria [cu]), the new campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [unam]), harkened back to Calles’s canny use of public works to signify his government’s commitment to the social good. Like Calles, Alemán made the promotion of high culture a part of his presidential platform. However, the cultural rhetoric of Alemanismo eschewed references to the revolution to rationalize federal investment in fine art. Instead, it openly embraced high culture, employing a civilization discourse that situated national culture within the Western tradition of great art rather than the parochial concerns of popular nationalism. This preference for universal values over cultural particularity is manifest in federal cultural policy throughout the period. During the 1950s, the government stepped up its promotion of Mexican art from all periods, not just the postrevolutionary renaissance. But rather than concerning itself exclusively with the social needs of the citizenry, the state’s promotional efforts were oriented to the exterior as well. If during the interwar years, the government attempted to renationalize what was essentially an international avant-­garde art, in the postwar years it attempted to redeploy this national art in the international arena. Mexican art became an emblem of Mexico’s claim on modernity and a form of public relations in the sphere of international politics. And mural art, the nation’s most renowned contribution to the Western tradition, was its calling card. However, in order for muralism to function as a sym-

bol of culture rather than politics, it had to be divested of its stigmatic association with socialism and armed rebellion and resignified as a purely aesthetic expression of a “Mexican universal.” This was accomplished through exhibitionary practices developed at the Palace and then sent abroad. The federal establishment of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura [inba]) in 1946 signaled this shift in cultural policy. Placed under the auspices of the sep, inba was created to oversee “development, creation, and research of the fine arts in the fields of music, plastic arts, drama, dance, literature, and architecture.”94 As part of the government’s new “fine arts plan” the National Museum of Art (Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas) was installed in the Palace the following year. This system of galleries devoted almost exclusively to Mexican art presented the first coherent narrative of national aesthetic progress from pre-­Hispanic times to the present in a Mexican institution.95 As such it served as the foundation for the state’s official vision of Mexican art promoted abroad. In his address to the public at its inauguration, Carlos Chávez, director of inba, praised President Alemán for his recognition of the social value of the fine arts and detailed his vision of the new National Museum of Art.96 Invoking the Greeks, he asserted that a well-­born state exists to promote the good life, and that it should develop the diverse governmental means “to make the lives of its citizens more secure, healthier, better, and more beautiful.”97 He went on to recount the “practical services of the arts to the state” as well, asserting that the fine arts were the best means of promoting a country “abroad and into the future” in that they generated revenue through tourism and the culture industries.98 However, the state’s interest in culture was not purely economic. Art, he maintained, “is the most effective way to unite

the members of a collectivity, to elevate ethical norms, to express the anxieties of individuals as well as the collective, to communicate in general and to strengthen national personality.”99 In short, the state’s renewed commitment to art would help to “consolidate mexicanidad.”100 “With the initiation of this museum,” he concluded, “a Mexican expression, authentically Mexican, and at the same time of authentic universal value, will begin to take form, to make itself tangible, and to put itself within the reach of all.”101 Nowhere in his address did he make references to the popular revolution or to the sociopolitical value of culture. Rather, he emphasized the humanist virtue of the fine arts as an expression of the nation’s spirit. In his address Chávez made clear that it was democratic access to high culture, not culture as a weapon for social democracy, that was at stake. As such, he echoed the party’s conviction that the revolution was now institutionalized, and that Mexico was ready to take its place among modern civilized nation-­states. The museum was placed under the direction of Fernando Gamboa, the director of visual arts for inba. A one-­time artist turned cultural technocrat, Gamboa had been associated with leftist politics and the lear in the 1930s, and he was particularly close with Siqueiros. Through numerous positions in government ministries and museums, Gamboa would pioneer a distinctive exhibitionary style that Olivier Debroise calls “spectacular museography.”102 This variant of didactic museology employs devices such as dramatic lighting, innovative supports, monumental photographs, and a theatrical arrangement of objects deployed in the service of a curatorial program or script rather than for their own inherent historical or formal interest. Gamboa learned his craft when participating in the organization of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a colossal exhibition planned in the late 1930s and mounted in 1940 at the Museum A Palace for the People  51

of Modern Art in New York. The style he derived from this experience has dominated curatorial practice within Mexico and beyond its borders since the 1940s. And it was from his institutional position at the Palace that Gamboa put his curatorial theories into practice through the exhibitions he mounted on site and for travel abroad. Under Gamboa’s direction, the Palace’s many non-­contiguous galleries were unified conceptually through an installation of pre-­Columbian, colonial, folk, and modern art as part of a comprehensive and highly ideological history of Mexican art. (These displays are no longer extant, as the Palace now functions as a Kunsthalle.) The murals by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros permanently installed in the Palace’s third-­floor corridors were incorporated into the museum’s collection, although they remained outside the galleries slated for exhibitions. With this gesture, the entire Palace became a museum of national art, and los tres grandes became the official representatives of the mural tradition. This was a significant moment in the consolidation of not only national culture but also its pantheon of hero-­artists. The museum exhibited forty-­five self-­portraits by important Mexican artists in one of its galleries. Additionally, inba published the first compendium of Mexican painters, which included biographies, photographs, and reproductions of work by each artist. Through a new program meant to “pay homage to the artists who had contributed to the formation of a national identity,”103 the museum created an official pantheon of artists, promoting the careers of the three greats as well as a slightly younger generation of artists and, in particular, Rufino Tamayo. The first retrospective in this series of “national homages” coincided with the inauguration of the museum and surveyed Orozco’s career.104 In 1948, the museum organized a retrospective of Tamayo’s career. And a year later, in 1949, it mounted the largest and most spectacular 52   A Palace for the People

of the series, a national homage to Diego Rivera in which the artist’s work over a period of fifty years was installed throughout the Palace’s galleries and corridors.105 These exhibitions were staged for a national audience, but the museum’s activities at the Palace were also implicated in the development of a program of cultural diplomacy to facilitate political and economic relations during the cold war. With the canon of modern masters in place, the Mexican government could now dedicate itself to promoting an official narrative of Mexican art abroad. Gamboa brought his programmatic vision of Mexican art to the international community through his selections for international biennials and a mega exhibition entitled Mexican Art from Antiquity to the Present that he organized in 1952 but which would travel throughout the world in modified form until the late 1970s.106 By the 1950s, it was clear that culture had become a weapon in the Manichean divide between the United States and the Soviet Union.107 Non-­ aligned countries with strong socialist elements like Mexico found themselves in a delicate position, desiring to oppose United States hegemony but to resist Soviet aggression as well.108 This political standoff structured aesthetic discourse and practice within an international art world increasingly dominated by the New York school. Seeking to insert themselves into an international order that equated realism with oppression and abstraction with freedom, artists and cultural promoters in Mexico had to negotiate a set of political exigencies issuing from within the country and from beyond its borders. A succession of three mural commissions at the Palace between 1951 and 1952 reveals the complexities of the cultural gambit played by Mexican artists, critics, and the federal government in an international politico-­cultural arena being radically reshaped by cold war politics. In this struggle, the Palace of Fine Arts would

serve as venue for not only the staging of an epic confrontation between social realism and the pure plastic values of the international style but also the symbolic transfer from the first generation of mural art to the second, from a politically engaged art form dedicated to the popular struggle of the Mexican Revolution to a sacralized genre of national patrimony valued for its contributions to international modernism.

Gamboa’s Exhibition and the International Politics of Realism Siqueiros’s Dialectical Realism %%Siqueiros

received the first of these commissions in 1951 when Fernando Gamboa invited him to execute a second mural cycle for the Palace to hang in the southern corridor along the third floor, directly across from his The New Democracy. This commission followed on the heels of Siqueiros’s triumph at the 1950 Venice Biennial. Gamboa had curated the Mexican contribution to the biennial with an exhibition of works by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Tamayo. The jury awarded Siqueiros second prize after Henri Matisse, which represented the greatest success of a Mexican artist in international exhibition to date. Siqueiros executed a portable diptych on the theme of Cuauhtémoc, the warrior-­prince who valiantly resisted Cortés’s invasion and attempts to locate the Aztec treasury (figures 11 and 12). The two panels, titled The Torture of Cuauhtémoc (1950–51) and The Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc (1950–51), reiterate the theme and technical orientation Siqueiros announced in 1944 when he opened his Center of Realist Art with the visual exercise Cuauhtémoc against the Myth (1944).109 He derived the proportions and spatial dispositions of the figures in the cycle via photo projection and executed the resultant work in pyroxilin

on Celotex with a spray gun. The first panel depicts the historic episode of Cuauhtémoc’s torture, while the second prophesizes the resurrection of his spirit in the image of an armor-­clad indigenous warrior slaying the centaur of the Spanish conquest. Having appropriated the technology of the enemy, this modern Cuauhtémoc represents the anticolonial struggles of “weak peoples” who have “taken up arms in order to bring down their enslavers and executioners.”110 While referring to the historic plight of Mexico’s indigenous population, the mural was intended to address the contemporary “destroyers of culture,” symbolized by the atomic energy unleashed by the slain centaur’s fist.111 As a revolutionary diptych, the two panels represent Siqueiros’s dialectical approach to public art in which a visual thesis and its antithesis are synthesized by viewers as they experience the work in motion. Once again, Siqueiros utilizes the narrow confines of the balcony corridor to force an ambulatory viewer to come into close contact with his images. The figures are located off center in each panel, through a compositional ratio of one to two that is repeated in both. In the first, the victimized Aztecs form a horizontal plane across two-­thirds of the image, while the vertical cadre of conquistadors align themselves with the right-­ hand edge. The second panel mirrors this structure but reverses its meaning, as the resurrected Cuauhtémoc stands upright along the left side of the image, and his felled enemy occupies the horizontal expanse from the center to the far right. Siqueiros’s portable panels were commissioned for the Palace; however, The Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc was conceived with its inclusion in Gamboa’s 1952 exhibition in mind. In the 1930s Siqueiros had painted images of the international proletariat for an audience of Mexican workers to assert a link between Mexico’s struggles for liberation and the broader battle for socialism against A Palace for the People  53

fascism. However, now, when addressing an international audience, he opted to assert the valiant opposition of Cuauhtémoc against the Spanish conquistador as a thinly veiled metaphor for Mexico’s resistance against the new imperialism of a cold war political and cultural order. In this respect he inadvertently repeated the strategies of Mexican artists in the nineteenth century, who had also mobilized Cuauhtéhmoc and episodes from the conquest to protest the economic imperialism and celebration of 1492 at the Chicago World’s Fair.112 Then, as in 1951, the Indian warrior 11 David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 1950–51

54   A Palace for the People

served as a potent figure of national autonomy. Siqueiros’s reengagement with indigenismo as a reinvigorated sign of national autonomy was part of a subaltern “third worldism” aligned against the first-­world standoff between the cold war superpowers. Within this context Siqueiros’s national theme was a defense of Mexican muralism against the anti-­communist attacks on socially engaged realism and the muralists’ contribution to the international avant-­garde. It is notable that when mobilizing indigenismo within an international context, Siqueiros opted for a masculine figura-

12 David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc, 1950–51

tion of Mexico’s Indian self rather than the feminine allegories so common in the early murals. It is also notable that Siqueiros’s Cuauhtémoc cycle represents a historically specific male figure, rather than a generic female allegory, to render national agency. As Anne McClintock argues, national agency is typically configured as masculine and competitive, while women serve as boundary markers of the nation, its symbolic limit, but not its agents.113 The work is situated along the corridor opposite to his The New Democracy triptych within the Palace atrium, and the two cycles demonstrate precisely this gender dynamic. A monu-

mental female nude represents the abstract value of democracy, while a historically specific male warrior stands in for the defiant postcolonial nation. In this sense, Siqueiros’s defense of realism is decidedly Mexican and masculine. Gamboa’s New Realism %%Gamboa’s show debuted in Paris and then trav-

eled to Stockholm and London before being installed for a domestic audience at the Palace in 1955. Writing to Chávez from Venice on the heels of the biennial success, Gamboa described his plan for the exhibition as follows: A Palace for the People  55

As for the Paris exhibition, I have come to the conclusion that it should include in its contemporary section 70% of works by our four major artists, and only 30% of severely selected artists of the following generations, and only those that reveal their sense for the new realism that characterize Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and Tamayo. In the same proportion, I mean, 70%, we should provide photographic reproductions of their mural paintings, as there is a great interest (and a lot of ignorance) about it. As possible, this room should be completed with two or three portable murals, especially painted by Diego, Siqueiros and Tamayo. As an introduction to this collection of current art, we will take a synthetic, but exceptional, grouping of pre-­Columbian art, a few monoliths, tiny sculptures and blow-­ups of our pre-­Columbian painting, and some smaller photographs of architectural samples of that same period, that would give to the collection an accurate background. As part of this introduction, a dramatic set of popular art; a few, but extremely Mexican Colonial pieces and photographs of baroque architecture. Nothing from the nineteenth century—with the exception of some striking engravings by Posada.114

As this correspondence makes clear, the exhibition aimed to bring contemporary Mexican art, especially the murals of Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Tamayo, to the attention of international audiences. In addition to Siqueiros’s Cuauhtémoc panel, Chávez commissioned Rivera and Tamayo to execute portable works for the exhibition that would then be installed at the Palace at the end of the show’s run. Orozco’s participation in this aspect of the show was precluded by his death in 1949. Through the dramatic use of photographs and theatrical displays that interspersed contemporary works with pre-­Columbian, colonial, and folk art, the exhibition argued visually that Mexi56   A Palace for the People

can art was monumental, figurative, and unified across time and space through an ahistorical Kunstwollen, or will to form.115 Thus, when Gamboa refers to “the new realism” in contemporary Mexican art, he is invoking not Siqueiros’s concept of a socially legible political art but rather the modernist concept of formal affinities. Siqueiros argued that figuration was necessary in order to communicate the social message of Mexican art to the public without an intermediary. For him, pro-­realist art was a foil to the dehumanized abstraction of the School of Paris and its equivalent in the United States, the New York school. For Gamboa, figuration was an aesthetic attribute of Mexican art across time, and the hallmark of the Mexican school of painting made famous by mural art. He too viewed Mexican art as an alternative to the cultural authority of Paris and the nascent hegemony of abstract expressionism. For a brief moment, the interests of the postwar government and mural artists converged. Unified by a mutual desire to promote Mexican art within the international arena, they rallied around the cause of realism, albeit defined in fundamentally different ways. However, the implicit tensions in this arrangement became manifest when Rivera revealed his submission to the exhibition. Rivera’s “Realist Fantasy” %%Gamboa

and Chávez gave Rivera complete discretion in terms of subject matter. Rivera told them that his mural would be about peace, which fit perfectly within their curatorial vision.116 The artist’s interpretation of this theme, however, was anything but pacific. Rivera’s mural, The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace: A Realist Fantasy (1952), depicts Mexican workers soliciting petitions for the 1951 Berlin Peace Accords (figure 13). Two monumental murals occupy the middle ground, as Rivera uses the “painting within the painting” device to explicitly endorse

not only Stalin but also Soviet-­style socialist realism.117 The mural on the left depicts Stalin and Mao Zedong offering Uncle Sam, John Bull, and Belle Marianne a pen with a treaty to sign. Mao and Stalin loom over these diminutive caricatures. The elderly Uncle Sam wears glasses and carries a Bible and rifle; John Bull sports brass knuckles and his face is grotesquely contorted. Marianne is the least savaged of the bunch, but she stands with her allies around a satchel of U.S. dollars, demonstrating Europe’s dependence on United States capital and the Marshall Plan. Meanwhile, the communist leaders preside benignly over the globe and foist the white dove of peace on the greedy, myopic, and hesitant trio. In the second mural a faceless military lynches civilians, whips prisoners, and lines up in a firing squad before a crucified Soviet soldier on a battlefield devastated by an atomic blast. Rivera placed the “dream of peace” on the left and the “nightmare of war” on the right, so as to associate each image with the Left-­Right political division between socialism and capitalism. Located along the right edge of the peace mural, the three capitalist leaders are visually associated with the war mural. In the “nightmare of war” Rivera makes an explicit connection between the atomic denouement of World War II and the current conflict in Korea (1950–53), the first of many “hot wars” waged in the third world to stem the advance of communism. The racialized features of the victims depicted characterize American aggression in Southeast Asia as a manifestation of domestic racism and neocolonial empire. The mural thereby reiterates the theme of Siqueiros’s The New Democracy and his Cuauhtémoc cycle. The murals within Rivera’s mural represent two forms of realism—Stalin’s variant of socialist realism and Mexican muralism’s brand of social realism—neither of which could be criticized for skirting the “precise political moment.”118 The

peace mural displays the “cult of personality” associated with Stalinist art, while the image of modern militarism presents an unqualified indictment of the capitalist war machine. In this sense, Rivera was responding to Siqueiros’s criticism in 1935 of his unscientific approach to realism as well as his calls in the 1940s for a renewed commitment to realism, per se, in the wake of abstraction’s international assent. As Reyes Palma argues, Rivera’s mural addressed both European and domestic constituencies. His oxymoronic subtitle for the work—a “realist fantasy”—was “an act of political pragmatism” calculated to appear as though it were an endorsement of Soviet dogma, but intended to appease his critics within Mexico’s artistic Left.119 Artists like Siqueiros had been attacking his undialectical style since the 1930s, using his Rockefeller mural as evidence of his academic approach to realism. In his autobiography, Rivera admits that he intended the subject of this mural to “complement and carry forward that of the Rockefeller mural.”120 Not only did it reinforce the Manichean political vision of his 1934 fresco, but it was also calculated to obscure his ignominious flirtation with Trotskyism and thereby broker his readmission to the Communist Party. Reyes Palma contends that Rivera devised the mural with its permanent installation at the Palace in mind. Recognizing that it would eventually hang in proximity to his Rockefeller mural, the artist sought to “re-­Stalinize” his mural art for posterity.121 Rivera’s agenda was entirely personal and completely at odds with those of his federal patrons. He anticipated censure and even courted a media scandal to get the party’s attention. However, once again, he underestimated his patrons’ tolerance. Chávez and Gamboa had been allies of the artist throughout his career. But this mural put them in a difficult position. Rivera’s impolitic cariA Palace for the People  57

13 Diego Rivera, The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace: A Realist Fantasy, 1951

catures of France and England would offend two of the host countries for their exhibition. His endorsement of the Berlin Peace Accords effectively allied Mexico with communism against capitalism, which threatened the foreign investment the state hoped to attract with the exhibition. Further, his overt endorsement of orthodox socialist realism cast Mexican muralism as a local variant of Soviet dogma, rather than a humanist alternative to abstraction. Rivera’s communist propaganda had served the populist stratagems of the Mexican state during the Maximato, but now, before international eyes, his political grandstanding embarrassed a government that was positioning itself as modern, politically neutral, and above all civilized. Within the context of this exhibition, muralism was no longer simply a technique of national governance; rather, it was an instrument of cultural diplomacy. Despite the support of Mexican artists who petitioned for Rivera’s artistic rights, Chávez censored the mural, coming to an agreement with the artist and quietly dropping the work from the show.122 As this episode reveals, the Mexican exhibition was organized to do more than simply educate Europeans about Mexican art. It was mounted to facilitate myriad political and economic agendas of the postwar state. In particular its organizers sought to present an impressive image of Mexican civilization—one whose modernity was rooted in an alternative but no less spectacular antiquity than that of the European avant-­garde. This modernity was socially engaged, but its realism was less a product of popular revolution than a contemporary expression of an innate ethno-­ cultural impulse. Chávez and Gamboa wanted to maintain the social consciousness of Mexican art so as to distinguish it from the political agnosticism of contemporary abstraction. Their vision of mexicanidad invoked a racialized spirit of resistance to imperialism that could be played as an ethical card in international relations. 60   A Palace for the People

Within this political context, Rivera’s mural was anathema, while works like Siqueiros’s The Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc served multiple ends. Its reference to the Aztec martyr recollected a heroic episode in the nation’s past, casting modern Mexico in an indigenous guise. It also served as an emblem of non-­aligned resistance to the nuclear threat posed by the cold war, its radical indigenismo functioning as a sign of third worldism within a clash of global hegemons. While Siqueiros’s mural corresponded with the state’s political agenda, it proved to be a liability for its diplomatic mission. The aesthetic disputes of the cultural cold war would make Gamboa’s promotion of Siqueiros’s brand of realism untenable, prompting him to shift his allegiance to the mytho-­poetic figuration of Rufino Tamayo.

Mytho-­poetic Figuration: Tamayo’s Solution to the International Politics of Realism Siqueiros’s militant figure was anomalous in the exhibition, as the overwhelming number of works depicted peaceful subjects, in particular, picturesque renderings of Indian women and peasants. A third portable work commissioned from Tamayo was more consistent thematically with this picturesque indigenismo. However, his stylistic deviation from interwar realism helped to turn this parochial subject into a metaphysical emblem of postwar angst, thus bringing Mexican painting in line with the existential concerns of the international avant-­garde. Tamayo’s Homage to the Indian Race (1952) represents a Tehuana flower vendor (figure 14). However, unlike the nostalgic versions of this subject painted by Rivera, Tamayo portrays indigenismo as a vital but terrifying force. His Tehuana seems to vibrate with energy. Her torso and hands swivel and twist with a violence echoed in the rapid

14 Rufino Tamayo, Homage to the Indian Race, 1952

wing movement of the hummingbirds that hover around the tropical flowers she sells. Tamayo restricted his palette to muddy browns contrasted with vibrant pinkish reds that invoke the natural environment of a subtropical region. He derived his forms from pre-­Columbian sculpture so as to assert an affinity between Mexican antiquity and modernist art. And his style betrays his career-­ long engagement with the European avant-­garde, in particular, the cubist analysis of form in space, surrealist biomorphism, and a futurist interest in dynamic movement. However, Tamayo’s interpretation of this national theme speaks to the crisis culture of the postwar period. Following the example of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Tamayo endeavored to turn Mexican symbols and history into generalized meditations on the human condition and to thereby avoid the provincialism of the Mexican school. Thus his flower vendor is not a picturesque emblem of the nation’s vibrant popular culture. Rather, she represents a primal and atavistic force that haunts the present, threatening its modernity. Even as Tamayo employed the biomorphic distortions pioneered by Picasso and the surrealists, he rejected the postwar turn toward pure abstraction in favor of a mytho-­poetic figuration. In this way his work, more than Siqueiros’s, came to embody the goals of the exhibition. Gamboa and Chávez were attempting to present an image of political neutrality in which Mexico and its artistic heritage neither bowed to the cultural authority of Paris and New York nor endorsed the political position of Stalin. Their political stance was anti-­imperialist but promoted peace. And through their exhibition they hoped to present an essentially depoliticized image of Mexican art that nonetheless maintained the vitality and centrality of figuration as a viable alternative to the universalist claims of abstraction. Straddling the line between a commitment to social 62   A Palace for the People

justice and the promotion of a pacific aestheticism proved to be extremely difficult, however. While the show was praised for its spectacular museography, critics attacked the contemporary works as Stalinist propaganda. Dredging up Gamboa’s youthful association with the Left and Siqueiros’s role in the first assassination attempt on Trotsky, anti-­Stalinist intellectuals accused the organizers of being Soviet agents and characterized realism itself as evidence of the artist’s communist orientation. Social realism proved to be too tainted by interwar politics to function strategically in the cold war environment. However, through this exhibition, Tamayo demonstrated his international appeal. Critics in the United States such as Clement Greenberg and the artist Barnett Newman had been praising Tamayo’s painting since the 1940s. Distinguishing him from the “professional patriots” of the Mexican school, they saw affinities between the “basic terror [and] brutality of life” expressed in his art and the concerns of the nascent New York school.123 Likewise, he appealed to the French, who were struggling to maintain a foothold within an art world increasingly centered in the Americas. For them, not only did Tamayo oppose the Stalinism of his peers, but his allegiance to the school of Paris made him more attractive than the abstract expressionists.124 And for the Mexicans, he represented a viable alternative to the stigmatic socialism so closely associated with national culture at a time when the government sought to present a more cosmopolitan face. Tamayo’s success abroad was met with resistance at home, in particular from Siqueiros, who recognized all too well the political interests fueling it. In a long public address delivered at the Palace in 1955 Siqueiros implicated Tamayo in the international attack on Mexico’s figurative tradition, which he traced to the Unites States State Department and the anti-­Stalinist Left in the Pari-

sian avant-­garde.125 Citing a series of interviews with Tamayo in the foreign press in which the artist complained about the Mexican state’s patronage of painting with a “social message” and declared himself a voluntary “counterrevolutionary,” Siqueiros accused Tamayo of conspiring with the “Yankee campaign” against Mexican painting.126 Siqueiros’s remarks were occasioned by the growing animosity toward social realism evident in the changing critical reception of Gamboa’s international exhibitions. He began his address with a time line that surveyed the response in the international press to these exhibitions from the positive reviews of the 1950 Venice Biennial through the mounting antagonism toward Mexican art over the three years Gamboa’s exhibition toured Europe, and culminating with the pullout of all United States lenders to the show when it was mounted at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1954. Likewise, Siqueiros chronicled the Mexican state’s intimidation in the face of this “campaign,” citing the censorship of Rivera’s peace mural as well as Chávez’s published defense of Mexican art against charges that it was “communist” in orientation.127 For Siqueiros, Chávez’s renunciation of any connection between Mexican mural art and communism represented the broader capitulation of Mexican cultural administrators and artists to the “political panic” engendered by the United States’ driven attack on social realism. Siqueiros concluded his address with a call for robust federal support of figurative and social art. “In this matter,” he exclaimed, “it is not possible for the state to be neutral.”128 With his unsuccessful call for an official policy that defended Mexico’s revolutionary art, Siqueiros sought to combat Tamayo’s impact on the direction of federal patronage. For on the heels of his international approbation, Tamayo was granted two commissions for permanent installation at the Palace in 1952. The story of the com-

missions’ origin is apocryphal but telling. Tamayo claims that he goaded the Mexican government into it when he was first asked to participate in Gamboa’s traveling exhibition. As a precondition, Tamayo asked Gamboa to clarify the state’s official position on art. After a period of time, Gamboa drafted a reply in which he proclaimed that the government supported all art of “quality,” not just “polemical art,” and as proof, he asked Tamayo to execute two murals for the Palace to hang alongside those of the three greats.129 While this account is not corroborated in any documentation outside the published claims of Tamayo’s interlocutors in the international art press, it reveals the period stakes of his Palace commissions. For his part, Gamboa endeavored to capitalize on Tamayo’s international stature so as to demonstrate the state’s nonpartisan cultural orientation. Calling Tamayo the “fourth great” of Mexican muralism, Gamboa hoped to depoliticize the entire mural tradition and craft its competing aesthetic and ideological positions into a movement unified by a formal commitment to figuration rather than a political commitment to social revolution. Tamayo took the commission but refused the designation. “I’m not the ‘Fourth Great One,’” he exclaimed in a very prominent art column in Excélsior. “I’m neither the fourth, nor am I great,” he continued. “I am the first in a new modality of Mexican painting that attempts a universal voice, instead of limiting itself to that chauvinistic painting that we could well call ‘the School of Huipanguillo.’”130

Tamayo’s “Natural Being”: Recodifying Mestizaje Gamboa’s exhibition had revealed that the Mexican school was a liability in the international arena. Tamayo’s success within this largely failed act of A Palace for the People  63

cultural diplomacy demonstrated that a universal art could be mined from the figurative tradition of the Mexican school, but not by linking Tamayo to the three greats. Instead, Tamayo would need to be distinguished from the first phase of mural art, and that distinction would be based on the difference between figurative painting with a social message and figurative painting engaged in mythmaking. But while Tamayo’s monumental paintings should be considered alongside those of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko as a response to the crisis of culture following World War II, his success would have been impossible without the critical discourse of Octavio Paz. Gamboa and Chávez had only partially succeeded in recodifying the Mexican school from a radical social experiment into a modern iteration of an ancient formal impulse, but their endorsement of realism and commitment to Siqueiros had left them vulnerable to the anti-­Stalinist Left. And while Tamayo had proved his utility, he had also been a thorn in his federal patrons’ side, using the international art press as leverage in his war with both los tres grandes and a government that he believed had ignored him for too long. Tamayo was able to wrangle two Palace commissions through this method. However, he would need Paz to explain the significance of his art for both Mexico and the Western world. Ultimately Paz’s defense of Tamayo did what Gamboa and Chávez could not do: it reconstituted Mexican muralism as art, not politics. Paz found a way to maintain the centrality of mural art to Mexico and the West while repudiating its political goals. He characterized the Mexican school as the failed first phase in the course of Mexican modernism and asserted Tamayo not as the “fourth great” but rather as a force of reconciliation. Tamayo, argued Paz, was able to overcome the failures of los tres grandes and to make Mexican art universally relevant without sacrificing cultural specificity. 64   A Palace for the People

Tamayo’s Palace commissions, like those of his peers, represented an official embrace after an extended period of voluntary exile. And like his peers, Tamayo sought to place his “new modality” in dialogue with what he denigrated as the School of Huipanguillo so that audiences might judge for themselves the relative merits of both. However, unlike Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, Tamayo did not view the Palace as an opportunity to politicize the Mexican public or to critique the current regime. Nor did he grapple with the ideological contradictions of painting in a state institution. For him, there was no contradiction. His war was with los tres grandes, not a counterrevolutionary state or party. Casting himself as a lone warrior for non-­polemical art, Tamayo viewed his Palace commissions as the most significant opportunity yet to position himself publicly as the preeminent opponent of the Mexican school of painting and its mural tradition. In this respect he sought to reverse Siqueiros’s politicization of aesthetics, working instead to aestheticize politics by redirecting the art world from questions about social justice to inquiries into pure painting. To some extent, Tamayo’s position on aesthetics and politics echoed that of Breton, Trotsky, and Rivera in their manifesto of 1938. Like them, he insisted that artists needed freedom from political control in order to express inner truths. However, Breton, Trotsky, and Rivera had insisted that “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.” And they explicitly cautioned against art for the sake of art rather than political change. “It should be clear by now,” they write, “that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-­called ‘pure’ art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction.”131 In 1938 they viewed the geometric abstraction that followed cubism as just

as politically bankrupt as totalitarian art. While Tamayo shared their rejection of abstraction, he did not reject “pure” art, that is, painting in the service of art, not politics. Tamayo did not believe that art should foster social revolution. He therefore rejected the ideas about both art and politics in Trotsky’s, Breton’s, and Rivera’s 1938 manifesto and the basic premise of the muralists, as articulated in their manifesto of 1923. Tamayo, however, was no fascist. His animosity toward the mural tradition was born of an imminent critique of the postrevolutionary cultural renaissance. Tamayo’s unique status as a “full-­blooded” Indian gave his commitment to pure painting a legitimacy not available to others. As an artist whose “racial heritage,” as Jean Charlot notes, was not “a cerebral option but a biological fact,” Tamayo was particularly sensitive to the paternalism of “official Indigenismo.”132 He saw painted illustrations of solidarity with the Indian as politically disingenuous and aesthetically misguided. As early as 1933, Tamayo elaborated his position and called for a new direction, one that would build from the “intuitive” formal legacies of Mesoamerican sculpture while maintaining a commitment to exploring the plastic problems of pure painting.133 And while he garnered support among the Contemporaneos group and the renegade critic Luis Cardoza y Aragon, he remained a minor figure in the Mexican art world through the late 1940s.134 It was not until the 1950s, when Octavio Paz inaugurated his career as a cultural critic with an often-­reproduced essay entitled “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” that this counter-­ discourse would begin its ascent. Cuauhtémoc Medina argues that Paz’s entry into art criticism announced his definitive break with his own communist youth.135 In Tamayo’s painting he found a kindred spirit and opportunity. Through Tamayo, Paz hoped to combat the visual hegemony of Greenbergian modernism by

articulating an alternative that was neither socialist nor a wholesale renunciation of the accomplishments of the Mexican cultural renaissance. Paz understood that the cold war attack on social realism, and the Mexican muralists in particular, augured the marginalization of Mexican art and its relegation to the periphery of modernist culture and history. He therefore crafted a clever defense of Mexican muralism in which the ideological and formal failures of the first generation were reconciled by Tamayo. In “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” Paz reiterated some of the claims of his recently published The Labyrinth of Solitude.136 In fact, the two works make nearly identical arguments about the Mexican psyche and the reconciliatory role of art. The essay on Tamayo simply condenses the longer book-­length essay by focusing exclusively on Mexican painting. He begins by asserting that contemporary Mexican art is the result of the Mexican Revolution and thus its “aesthetic and moral” ambiguities follow from the “insufficiencies” of that epic struggle. Siqueiros had made a similar argument in his dispute with Rivera in 1934. However, while Siqueiros argued that the failures of the revolution could be overcome through proletarian struggle, Paz insists that they be reconciled through myth. Paz asserts that the revolution set in motion two contradictory projects: one a “return to origins . . . a revelation of Mexico’s historic subsoil,” and the other an “attempt to make our country into a really modern nation . . . to overcome what is called our ‘historical backwardness’ . . . by inserting [ourselves] in a definite universal tradition.” This dialectic between the particular and the universal, between tradition and modernity, between Mexico’s past and future, prompted artists to insert their nationalism into “the general current of the modern spirit.” Their solutions—the “adoption of certain techniques of production” and the invention of “a new vision A Palace for the People  65

of man and of history”—had resulted in an “unstable compromise” no different from the earlier attempts of “colonial Catholicism” or “republican liberalism”—between an imported ideology and an incommensurate local reality.137 With this opening statement, Paz establishes the main points of his argument: that the contradictions of Mexican muralism derive from the “dual condition” of the revolution; that artists had succeeded in revealing an authentic but heretofore obscured aspect of national character, but they had failed to provide an organic vision of the modern world that could transcend the traumas of national history; and that thus far the search for a “universal tradition” that could overcome Mexico’s particularity had resulted in the subjection of Mexican art to the false universalism of Marxist ideology. Describing Rivera as an epic “materialist,” Siqueiros as a “dramatic” activist, and Orozco as a “tragic” nihilist, Paz characterizes los tres grandes as emblems of the phases of the failed revolution.138 According to Paz, Orozco and Rivera “represent the two phases of the Mexican Revolution: Rivera, the return to origins; Orozco, sarcasm, denunciation and search.”139 Siqueiros’s blind adherence to Marxist ideology ultimately rendered his art as “escapist” as Rivera’s nostalgic reveries. Only Tamayo had found a way to reconcile tradition and modernity without falling into the pits of “ideology” or “nationalism.”140 Tamayo’s poetic disdain for anecdote, his eschewal of “ideological realism,” followed from what Paz calls his “natural being.”141 Invoking the artist’s indigenous heritage, Paz argues, “If there is antiquity and innocence in Tamayo’s painting, it is because he is rooted in a people: in a present which is at the same time a dateless past.”142 With this oxymoronic claim, Paz makes Tamayo the embodiment of the Mexican people. His Zapotec ancestry gives him insight into Mexico’s historical subsoil, allowing him to engage the “atro66   A Palace for the People

cious reality” of the modern world with a “humble realism” that “does not preach: it reveals.”143 Implicitly attacking the politicized art of Rivera and Siqueiros, Paz concludes: “Tamayo does not paint for us any future paradise, nor does he lull us to sleep by telling us that we live in the best of all possible worlds: neither does his art justify the horror of some with the excuse that others commit worse crimes: colonial misery and concentration camps, police states and atom bombs are expressions of the same evil.”144 With this groundbreaking argument, Paz essentially psychologized the historical struggles of the conquest and revolution in a manner similar to Harold Rosenberg’s characterization of the artistic response to the existential crisis of the atomic bomb in his critical appraisal of abstract expressionism.145 However, unlike the critics in the United States who promoted the New York school, Paz’s praise for Tamayo was rooted in the artist’s ethnic identity. While all the other postwar artists of note were appropriators of indigenous art and techniques, Tamayo, he argued, was the only artist who could claim a legitimate relationship to Indianness. In this way, Tamayo represented Mexico’s importance to the international avant-­garde. For Paz, Mexico, through Tamayo, could reveal something essential about the plight of modern man. Unlike the muralists whose indigenismo was parasitic on a people they never really knew, Tamayo’s affinity was ancestral. Thus, Paz exclaimed, “this modern man is very ancient.”146 The dialectic of authenticity and modernity in Paz’s promotion of Tamayo marks the ethics and the limits of his critique of Mexican muralism. On the one hand, it represented a legitimate critique of the paternalism of official indigenismo, while on the other hand it turned indigenous peoples into emblems of the crisis culture of the postwar period, phantom presences haunting Mexi-

can modernity rather than historical subjects or agents of national history. Likewise, by attacking narrative, ideology, and didacticism in art, Paz evaporated any role for mural art in the building of a new society. He argued that art should “reveal,” not “preach,” using only those “weapons proper to art.”147 Art’s function was to testify to the bewildering condition of modernity—to become an eloquent witness to the horrors of contemporary life—but not to attempt to intervene, to radicalize, or to effect change. Tamayo’s Palace murals both embodied and enabled Paz’s critique of Mexican muralism. Through scale and subject matter they maintain a dialogue with muralism. However, he abandoned fresco as well as paint on Masonite in favor of Vinylite, a synthetic paint, on canvas. This change in materials was both a technical solution and an ideological decision. By painting on canvas, Tamayo could work in his studio, roll the work up for storage or transport, and have it installed on site. As Tamayo’s career as a painter of monumental works for corporate buildings, world’s fairs, and government ministries heated up, this facilitated portability and allowed him to work on several commissions at a time. This method of working also freed his conceptual programs from engaging with their architectural support (a hallmark of Mexican muralism), thus reclaiming easel painting for public art after its denunciation in the radical fervor of the postrevolutionary period. Tamayo’s Palace murals should be viewed, then, as part of the heroic painting influenced by Picasso’s Guernica and heralded in the “triumph” of the New York school after World War II. Through style, medium, and their indifferent disposition toward architectural space, Tamayo’s Palace murals fundamentally revised muralism and all that it had attempted to do.148

Mexico and the Modern Mexican (Man), Tamayo’s Version %%Although

painted a year apart, Tamayo’s two Palace murals were conceived as a pair. Hanging opposite each other, they are located on the second-­floor balconies of the central atrium, situated just below the 1934 frescos by Orozco and Rivera. Birth of Our Nationality (1952) and Mexico Today (1953) expand upon Homage to the Indian Race by exploring the conquest of Mexico and its legacy in contemporary mestizaje (figures 15 and 16). While these subjects are consistent with those treated by his peers in the Mexican school, Tamayo’s approach is more poetic than didactic or narrative, and his take on national character and modernity tragic and timeless rather than politically empowering. Tamayo’s style and perspective are consistent with what Michael Leja calls “Modern Man primitivism,” the tendency in postwar art to conflate the existential crisis of the atomic age with the tragic themes of myth and the so-­called primitive expression of Amerindian art.149 Therefore, despite the national themes they recycle, his Palace murals derive from international art discourse more than they do the subaltern turn occasioned by postrevolutionary socialism. Birth of Our Nationality centers on the figure of a conquistador on horseback who violently tramples indigenous civilization. The horse invokes its prototype in Picasso’s Guernica, and the rubble heap beneath its hooves recalls the numerous piles of junk littering Orozco’s many frescos, including Catharsis. Lying amid this ruinous landscape is the Indian mother giving birth to the offspring of a mestizo nation. Tamayo characterizes the birth of Mexican nationality as the violent conquest of the feminized Indian body. Just as the sun begins to eclipse the moon, the phallic power of Spanish culture, represented by a vertical classical column, intrudes upon Mexico’s antiquity in ruins. A Palace for the People  67

15 Rufino Tamayo, The Birth of Our Nationality, 1952

16 Rufino Tamayo, Mexico Today, 1953

Like The Birth of Our Nationality, Mexico Today treats mestizaje as the structuring principle of Mexican reality. The mural is divided into three visual registers, each subtly shaded according to the Mexican tricolor of green, white, and red. At center, Tamayo depicts the modern Mexican violently stretched upon an architectural framework that is part Greek temple and part Aztec pyramid. This figure mirrors the mestizo baby birthed upon the ruins of pre-­Columbian culture across the atrium with his adult self. To his left lie the emerald ruins of Mesoamerican civilization, and to the right a modern city rises in tones of pink. A dark-­skinned woman donning a mask haunts the built environment, standing as a reminder of the ancient myths lurking just beneath the rational and scientific appearance of the modern world. The Birth of Our Nationality is situated just below Orozco’s Catharsis, while Mexico Today lies one floor beneath Man at the Crossroads. Each of Tamayo’s murals draws upon iconographic and compositional features in these earlier fres70   A Palace for the People

cos, but in invoking these precedents, he completely recodes them. For example, the Indian woman giving birth amid ruins recalls La Chata, the laughing prostitute splayed before the pile of industrialized armaments in Catharsis. However, unlike La Chata, whose status as prostitute linked her legally and symbolically to nonreproductive sex, Tamayo’s figure is captured in the act of giving birth. In this sense, The Birth of Our Nationality reconciles the binary of mother/whore staged in Rivera’s and Orozco’s murals, for Tamayo’s figure is the “Mexican Eve,” that is, a pro-­genitive Indian mother and a figure whose sexual betrayal of her people enacts the Fall, which modern nationalism seeks to overcome. Likewise, the cubo-­futurist figure stretched between two cultures and tortured by his hybridity located at the center of Mexico Today echoes the placement of the white worker situated at the crossroads in Rivera’s mural. Whereas Rivera’s (monocultural) worker was menaced by external political threats, Tamayo’s figure is tor-

tured by the psychological condition of an unreconciled duality. Rivera’s figure faces a choice between fascistic capitalism and socialism. He has the power to choose and thus to make history. Conversely, Tamayo’s figure mirrors the inner turmoil of the modern mestizo. He does not suggest a way out of the confusion of hybridity; rather his torqued and writhing physique externalizes or “reveals” this inner state. Mexico and the Modern Mexican (Man), Paz’s Version %%The

violent erotics and existential plight depicted across Tamayo’s Palace murals align with Octavio Paz’s diagnosis of Mexican psychology in The Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950. In his chapter on “The Sons of la Malinche,” Paz analyzes the common Mexican exclamation “¡Viva México, hijos de la chingada!” (loosely translated, “Long live Mexico, sons of the bitch!”). Paz characterizes this popular expression as a defensive posture “toward the outside world and, above all, from the past,” the titular “labyrinth of solitude” that imprisons the Mexican psyche.150 Paz describes the Spaniards’ historic “rape,” “seduction,” and “possession” of Indian women as the root cause of Mexico’s defensive hermeticism.151 He notes that popular nationalism has changed Malinche into the Chingada, a word that connotes a feminized—“passive, inert and open”—victim of masculine sexual aggression.152 The Chingada is therefore both the mother of the nation and a sexually violated figure. And while Paz draws a moral distinction between the prostitute, “who voluntarily surrenders herself,” and the Chingada, “the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived,” he immediately conflates the two in the generic figure of the feminine.153 He writes, “Every woman—even when she gives herself willingly— is torn open by the man, is the Chingada.”154 Thus ultimately, the violated Indian mother is the “will-

ing” whore while also a Mexican figuration of Woman. For Paz, the popular tendency to reduce the Mexican Eve to the maligned figure of the Chingada condemns Mexico’s origins to “nothingness” and “den[ies] our hybridism.”155 In Paz’s account, Mexicanness is constituted as a masculine rejection of the feminine and feminized origins: “The Mexican . . . does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: He is a man. He becomes the son of Nothingness. His beginnings are in his own self.”156 With this statement, Paz refers to the enactment of liberal reforms in the nineteenth century, which appealed to the “abstract and universal conception of man” in order to establish formal equality between Spanish-­ Creole, mestizo, and Indian.157 And while he acknowledges that this was a necessary step toward overcoming the legacies of colonial rule and establishing national autonomy, he nonetheless characterizes it as a “great rupture with the Mother,” by which he means Mexico’s indigenous heritage.158 While Paz reflects here upon historical trauma, his concern is ultimately psychological. He is advocating not reparations or even repudiation of the liberal subject but rather the reconciliatory powers of myth to re-­enchant the modern world and bring about communion between the past and the present, between men and women, and among nations. For Paz, the pathology of modern nationalism makes all men orphans from the cultural moorings of the past. Mexico’s contribution to the modern dilemma of orphanhood lies in her artists’ ability to transform history into productive myth. And this returns us to Paz’s endorsement of Tamayo and to Tamayo’s Palace murals. For in these two works Tamayo meditates upon the very same themes as Paz: the nation’s violent birth and the “dialectics of solitude” that characterize Mexico today.159 Unlike Orozco and Rivera, who commented A Palace for the People  71

on contemporary political crises, albeit in very different ways, Tamayo offers a value-­neutral meditation on the existential crisis of modern man. His recourse to national history can, in the words of Paz, “show us how that break came about and how we have attempted to transcend our solitude.” But this is not the history of the dialectical materialist or even the eternal return but rather history universalized as myth. “Every moribund or sterile society,” he concludes, “attempts to save itself by creating a redemption myth which is also a fertility myth, a creation myth. Solitude and Sin are resolved in communion and fertility.”160 In Paz’s formulation the mestizo is a self-­ generated man who, in denying his origins, reduces being to nothingness. Communion with his Indian self and mother culture will proceed through the conversion of that violent history into an origin story, a myth. This in turn will create the fertile ground upon which modern man can create a better future released from the psychic wounds of his traumatic past. Through this paradoxical formula, Paz both acknowledges and erases the violence toward women that grounds both history and myth. Through myth, genocide and gender violence are redeemed as generative resources for a mestizo citizenry constituted as at once masculine and universal. This recodification of mestizaje from a racialized marker of historical violence and social injustice to a generative metaphor for a future-­oriented modernity shares something with the governmental promotion of mestizaje after the revolution. However, an important difference lies in Paz’s acknowledgment of gender violence, even as it is disavowed in the turn toward myth. Yet even as both he and Tamayo place reproduction and birth at the center of national becoming, both ultimately appropriate the procreative powers of the female body through metaphors of creation and fertility that are attributed to the masculine artistic subject. I 72   A Palace for the People

will return to Paz’s paradoxical handling of gender, race, and national narration when discussing the museums of national history and anthropology in subsequent chapters. Despite the uncanny similarities between Tamayo’s painting and Paz’s diagnosis of the Mexican character, the former does not illustrate the latter. Rather, the poet and artist exerted a mutual influence on each other in their desire to renew Mexican art in pursuit of a Mexican universal. For Paz, Tamayo’s “natural being” as a full-­ blooded Indian grants him access to the “psychic subsoil” of modernity.161 For Tamayo, Paz’s critical appraisal finally established the proper link between his art and the School of Huipanguillo. Rather than being aligned with Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros as the “fourth great,” Tamayo was positioned as the first in an authentic new trajectory of modern painting. His art reconciled the aesthetic and ideological failures of the mural movement and thus ruptured the solitude and false universalism of postrevolutionary nationalism by bringing to Mexican art a truly universal, and therefore modern, but still authentic, voice.

A National Mausoleum after All Paz failed to significantly alter the trajectory of the international avant-­garde, but his promotion of Tamayo had an enormous impact on the national avant-­garde. By the end of the decade, his criticism of Mexican muralism had become an explicit attack on the Mexican state and its cultural patronage. Tamayo’s role in this anti-­state discourse, however, is paradoxical, as the very critical project that enabled his success also authorized the depoliticization of Mexican art necessary for an official culture. Shifra Goldman argues that Tamayo’s Palace murals marked the transition from a “revolutionary” to a “bourgeois” federal approach toward

art.162 Goldman links this shift to covert pressure from the United States State Department applied in part through a series of binational exhibitions mounted at the Palace between 1958 and 1966. At the Inter-­American Biennial held at the Palace in 1958, retrospectives of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros were included along with the work of younger artists who were continuing in the realist vein, such as Jorge González Camarena and Carlos Orozco Romero. Artists working in the United States such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline were exhibited as the United States’ representatives to the biennial. The overwhelming preference for realism among the artists chosen to represent Mexico contrasted sharply with the predominantly abstract work of the artists from the United States; thus the exhibit cast the two idioms as a competition between two national schools, obscuring the aesthetic differences among the Mexican artists on display. Despite the state’s attempts to depoliticize Mexican art, the promotion of social realism in this exhibition reveals that the government was still trying to assert los tres grandes as Mexico’s contribution to Western art. Tamayo’s work was absent from the Mexican galleries at the 1958 biennial. He was represented only by his two Palace murals. By the second biennial in 1960, all this had changed. Not only did Tamayo receive the international prize in painting, but a retrospective of his work was mounted in a special gallery. In 1966, the Palace hosted a show entitled Confrontation ’66! in which the competition between the muralists and the pure painters associated with Tamayo’s influence provided the organizing theme.163 By 1966 Tamayo was the Mexican government’s favored artist. His antipathy toward the Mexican school had fueled a slow sea change from a socially engaged public art practice—the mural device—to a politically agnostic form of monumental painting. In this capacity he

helped to broker the entry of other artists into federal patronage. These artists’ styles and aesthetic politics varied widely; however, none subscribed to Siqueiros’s belief that mural art could radicalize the viewer or challenge its institutional support. Through Paz, Tamayo had shown the federal government that muralism could be recodified as modernist art and used as an essentially decorative medium to illustrate the Mexicanness of any given project. As discussed in chapter 3, the diverse murals commissioned in 1964 for the new National Anthropology Museum reveal that by the 1960s the Mexican art world was multifaceted and complex, but thoroughly implicated in the adornment of state projects. Ritualized condemnations of the Mexican school notwithstanding, artists’ embrace of existential themes, political nihilism, and hermetic personal styles did away with even the rhetorical commitment to engaging with a public or fostering collective change. This turn is best embodied by José Luis Cuevas’s ephemeral mural project, launched in 1967. For Ephemeral Mural No. 1, Cuevas purchased a billboard at the intersection of Londres and Geneva streets in Mexico City. The “mural” consisted of a self-­portrait, Cuevas’s signature, a football player signifying aggression, and a sequence depicting victims of nuclear war aligned horizontally across the bottom of the image, using proportions derived from Picasso’s Guernica.164 Painted over a week and slated for destruction after one month, Cuevas’s mural was intended to be a pointed attack on Mexican muralism. Whereas murals are permanent, his was ephemeral. While murals are located within government buildings, his was painted on a billboard at a highly trafficked intersection. Muralists rely on forms of public or private patronage; Cuevas paid for his own mural. And as if anticipating the reconceptualization of citizenship that would take A Palace for the People  73

17 Jorge González Camarena, Humanity Freeing Itself, 1963

place in the 1990s, Cuevas conceived of his public as consumers (he offered to sell his mural at an absurd $20,000 and noted that it would be succeeded by an advertisement for cognac), while muralists address their public as political citizen-­ subjects. As this list of differences illustrates, Cuevas’s gesture was deliberately nihilistic, with the destruction of the object a literal emblem of his desire to kill Mexican muralism. However, like Paz before him, Cuevas limited his critique to the Mexican school, and Rivera and Siqueiros in particular. Condemning their art as monolithically “folklore art,” he too called for a “universal” Mexico “open to the whole world without losing its essential characteristics.”165 Never in his writings or his work does he implicate Tamayo in the cactus curtain. And even as his Ephemeral Mural No. 1 inadvertently mocks Tamayo’s aesthetic legacy (the reference to Guernica) while taking his commitment to pure painting to its logical extreme (the self-­portrait and autograph index the 74   A Palace for the People

bourgeois values associated with easel painting and the market fetishization of the artist’s persona, touch, and signature style), he insists that the problem lies exclusively with Mexican artists’ commitment to social realism. The last mural commissioned for the Palace reveals both Tamayo’s impact on the political aesthetics of mural art and the “conformist rut” that Cuevas lampooned in “The Cactus Curtain.” Painted in 1963, Jorge González Camarena’s Humanity Freeing Itself brings together the themes of martyrdom, war, fascism, and national struggle depicted across the sundry walls of this institution (figure 17). Unlike its predecessors, this painting was not paid for by the government but rather was financed by a group of bankers in exchange for the right to destroy two murals painted by the artist twenty years earlier in their club in the Guardiola building.166 The theme of Camarena’s Palace mural followed closely that of his destroyed works, in which he represented “creation” metaphorically

through seeds, stars, and “muscles in tension.” When Camarena completed the original cycle in 1942, the bankers balked at what they felt to be immoral procreative imagery and petitioned to have the works destroyed. Their efforts were thwarted until 1963, when an earthquake did enough damage to the building to justify removal. Thus, a deal was struck with inba, and Camarena set to work on a new mural, utilizing a similar vocabulary, but this time centered upon the theme of liberation.167 In Humanity Freeing Itself, a central crucified figure is flanked on the left by a bound Zapatista and on the right by an indigenous woman, representing the past and the future, respectively. They are separated from the central scene by the fragments of classical architecture that frame the struggling man as he smashes his own crucifix. Around him, anonymous men tear down the structures that confine them. At their right a glowing nude woman proffers the seed of reproduction in her hand. The struggle represented is at once universal and particular. Like Tamayo, Camarena treats Mexico’s traumatic past as a metaphor for the larger struggle of humanity. Iconographically, the image recalls the hand-­ to-­hand combat at the center of Orozco’s mural and the crucifixion that focuses Tamayo’s Mexico Today, as well as Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s references to fascism. The allegorical use of the nude invokes the centerpiece of Siqueiros’s The New Democracy and Tamayo’s Indian mother in Birth of Our Nationality. Thus, thematically, Camarena’s mural synthesizes the works that preceded it while simultaneously treating the social realist iconography of the first generation of muralists as ahistorical signifiers of postwar existential angst. Camarena’s mural is therefore about everything and nothing. Unlike Rivera’s fresco, its symbolism is so broad as to be meaningless. And it is too toothless to have the bite of Orozco’s satirical art. Compositionally, it neither challenges nor en-

gages the viewer. Each figure aligns with the rectangular format of the canvas, establishing a visual rhythm or cadence of vertical lines that reinforce rather than defy the picture plane. Thus the work betrays none of the experiments with polyangular perspective or visual dynamism that make even Siqueiros’s most conventional works visually compelling. Camarena’s vibrant pink, gold, and aqua palette complements the Palace interior in much the same way as Tamayo’s moody pastels. However, his mural lacks the subtle handling of national myth we see in Tamayo’s work. By contrast, its symbolism is all too familiar, a compendium of formulas that do not sustain the kind of critical reading that Paz brings to Tamayo’s work. Camarena’s mural, therefore, emblematizes the very processes charted in this chapter. As a second-­generation artist, his mural registers the effects of Tamayo’s challenge to the Mexican school on mural practice itself. Camarena’s mural does not engage the Palace of Fine Arts critically; rather it was added to represent the second generation of mural artists. Introduced as a work of art, not politics, Camarena’s mural not only represents rescued patrimony but also brings to a close the visual history of the movement chronicled on the Palace walls. Camarena was a quintessential state artist, providing patriotic illustrations for government-­issued textbooks as well as programmatic murals for many federal institutions, including the museums of both national history and anthropology. But as I’ve suggested, his mural practice might not have been possible without the intervention of Tamayo and Paz. After Camarena’s commission, additional murals by Rivera, Roberto Montengro, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano were rescued from edifices destroyed by the 1957 earthquake and added to the Palace’s atrium. The remainder effect of these arbitrary additions reinforces the notion that the Palace is the storehouse of valuable MexiA Palace for the People  75

can culture, and as such all orphaned objects of official art will be welcomed there. These very different images, executed under extremely different circumstances and for radically different sites (a tourist hotel, Lecumberri prison), are all subsumed under the exhibitionary sign of mural art. Rivera’s political satire, Montenegro’s neoclassical allegory, and Lozano’s symbolist lament are presented as instances of a national genre stripped of politics and history by a postwar discourse that categorizes all Mexican art as a modernizing spiritual will. Thus it is with irony that we return to Leopoldo Méndez’s satirical print for Frente a Frente. For in the end, the Palace is a national mausoleum. But this was not brought about by the Calles regime’s attempt to harness the leftist politics and international prestige of mural art in the consolidation of a postrevolutionary state and national party. Nor was it caused by Rivera’s self-­ promoting collusion with the Maximato’s cultural gambit. Rather, it was brought about by the contingent politics of realism during the cold war and the Alemán regime’s attempts to deploy muralism as its calling card on the international stage. Rivera’s and Orozco’s willingness to paint frescos at the Palace did establish this institution as a competitive site for the staging of disputes about politics and art. And yet even as state actors working in and through the Palace—like Gamboa and Chavéz—attempted to control the public image of Mexico’s mural tradition, the artists played an important part in this process. In the end, neither the state nor the artists controlled the destiny of muralism, as Siqueiros’s fate in Gamboa’s traveling exhibition makes clear. Rather, the external pressures of the cultural cold war, coupled with a powerful critique of cultural nationalism, played determining roles. Paradoxically, it was Octavio Paz’s attempts to universalize national history as modern myth through his 76   A Palace for the People

promotion of Tamayo that bastardized Trotsky’s and Breton’s call for the sublimation of politics in art into a politically agnostic psychologism. By construing the first generation of mural artists as symptoms of a pathological nationalism and Tamayo as an ethnically authentic mythmaker and thus cosmopolitan modernist, Paz attempted to maintain a place for mural art in an international art world being reshaped by the cold war. Whereas he succeeded in establishing Tamayo’s relevance at home and abroad, he inadvertently collaborated with the campaign led by the United States to denigrate Mexican muralism and, along with it, socially engaged forms of realism. The state endeavored to retool the Mexican school as an aesthetic legacy, while mural artists fought to maintain a political role for monumental painting. In the end they managed to salvage figuration as an aesthetic idiom, but at the expense of engaged politics. As Karen Cordero Reiman notes, the murals at the Palace testify to the historical construction of the very discourse that has limited their power, that of mexicanidad.168 And yet today the subtle discriminations between the artists’ aesthetic and ideological convictions, along with the historical context that incentivized them, remain invisible to the average viewer. For the Palace, like all museums, has turned cultural artifacts into fine art. What we see today is the institutionalized afterlife of a vibrant cultural debate muted by time and the museum effect. As a sanctifying space, the Palace of Fine Arts did contribute to the sacralization of Mexican muralism and to its restructuring from a revolutionary avant-­garde to an official art. A secular cathedral of national culture, the Palace has enabled the fetishization of this art form and helped in the construction of its pantheon of greats. Millions of visitors, both foreign tourists and national citizens, make pilgrimages to the Palace to see Rivera’s Rockefeller mural or to view los tres

grandes. The artists chosen to represent muralism at this site remain the most widely recognized Mexican artists. For it was at the Palace that certain mural artists were turned into the “plaster saints” that Paz disdains. For this reason, Cuevas locates the epiphany-­like conversion of his proxy, Juan, at the Palace. However, it would take another public institution—the National History Museum—to turn this genre of national culture into a technique

capable of shaping the performance of citizens in the manner Cuevas describes. At the National History Museum, mural art was reconstituted as a “telling technology” of national truth. Here, with the aid of didactic murals, visitors are situated as historical citizen-­subjects within the official narrative of national becoming. It is to this story that we now turn.

A Palace for the People  77

2

A Patriotic Sanctuary

Our administrators see themselves as the heirs and perpetuators of the Mexican Revolution. Hence, from the beginning, it has been their aim, insofar as possible, to exploit the painting of the Muralists. . . . They have looked on mural painting as a public art that, beyond this or that ideological inclination, expressed the genius of our people and its revolution. To the painters . . . it was once again no longer beyond contempt to use the walls of public buildings, when possible, to disseminate their beliefs. Thus the divergent interests of the government and of the painters coincided on an essential point. ­Octavio Paz Like Plutarco Elías Calles, Lázaro Cárdenas sealed his sexenio (1934–39) with a cultural project that embodied his administration’s claim on the legacy of the Mexican Revolution (1910–21). Whereas Calles inaugurated a “palace for the people,” Cárdenas opted for a “patriotic sanctuary.” In 1939, he inaugurated the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia [inah]), a federal ministry charged with the preservation, conservation, and restoration of archeological, artistic, and historic patrimony, and placed Chapultepec Castle— the former presidential residence and military academy—under its protection as a historical monument.1 Cárdenas bequeathed this symbol of executive privilege and patriotic sacrifice to the Mexican people to house a new museum dedicated to national history from the conquest to the revolution (figure 18).

The National History Museum opened its doors to the public in 1944 as a “modern” instrument of popular education, not “a repository of inanimate things.”2 In the words of its first director, José de Jesús Núñez y Domínguez, the museum would “teach the public [how] to see.” Through the most up-­to-­date museographic techniques, his museum would provide “legible and intelligible” visual lessons for the “man on the street.”3 However, its exhibitions were not merely educational. Núñez y Domínguez argued that museum display is also an effective form of “collective persuasion,” inculcating in the citizen a love of patria that can induce proper social and political participation.4 Writing in 1953, a reporter for El Universal Gráfico endorsed this claim, exclaiming, “Chapultepec is the sanctuary of the Patria, and its altar is the Museum. . . . Here, the civic conscience of the Mexican people lives and grows.”5

Despite the hopeful claims at its inauguration, a mere nine years later the National History Museum found itself at the center of a public debate over the meaning of the revolution that entailed a withering critique of the museum’s exhibitions. As a consequence, the displays were revamped, and in a fateful decision for muralism, artists were invited to paint historical murals in an effort to make the exhibitions on site more effective instruments of popular education and historical citizenship. Between 1948 and 1969, eight permanent murals were executed on site by José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Juan O’Gorman, and Jorge González Camarena. These monumental works provide vivid visual accounts of the conquest, independence, reform, Porfirian dictatorship, revolution, and 1917 Constitutional Congress. These murals were essential to the evolution of a particular style of museum display known as didactic exhibition that was pioneered at the National History Museum. By the late 1960s, the exhibitions, anchored by didactic murals, presented a coherent visual narrative of national history through chronological displays

that emphasized liberal values associated with progress, social equality, and national becoming. Using a sequence of galleries that wrap around the castle’s interior courtyard, museographers created an evolutionary walk that begins with the conquest and ends with the revolution. This exhibitionary script has antecedents in nineteenth-­century liberalism; however, its mode of presentation is indebted to Diego Rivera’s social realist mural style and in particular his cycle at the sep, painted between 1923 and 1928. In these early frescoes, Rivera demonstrated the didactic value of visual narrative and the performative use of architectural space. Moreover, he managed to elaborate a version of national history that situated the revolution as the logical and necessary outcome of the exploitation of Spanish colonialism and the Porfiriato. Rivera’s murals, however, proffered the revolution as a finite event—largely about agrarian reform—and as prelude to a future proletarian revolution. The museum, on the other hand, presents the revolution as an ongoing process, the endlessly deferred promise of future reform that Thomas Benjamin refers to as la Revo-

18 Exterior view

of Chapultepec Castle viewed from below, with the monument to the niños héroes in the foreground

A Patriotic Sanctuary  79

lución to indicate its status as institutionalized political myth.6 At the museum, David Alfaro Siqueiros was charged with depicting the revolution. Siqueiros’s characterization of the revolution as unresolved social conflict turned out to be eerily compatible with ruling party rhetoric about the “perpetual revolution.”7 This is the convergence between the state and its revolutionary artists that Paz laments in the epigraph. In seeking to claim the legacy of the revolution, both entities engaged in a political opportunism that coincided, quite literally, on the walls of public buildings. Federal administrators would tolerate leftist critique in return for masterful works of public art; leftist artists would work in state institutions in return for a public platform. The repercussions of this devil’s bargain for muralism are nowhere more evident than at the National History Museum. Ironically this would come about as a partial consequence of Siqueiros’s protest against the Mexican state and the dominance of Rivera’s mode of realism—with its meticulous detail and narrative didacticism—among postwar muralists. This protest played out in a public dispute between him and the architect and artist Juan O’Gorman over the plastic integration of murals and architecture and the “truth” in painting. The murals painted by these two artists at the National History Museum represent the final battle over the legacy of the Mexican mural renaissance and its relationship to official culture. In order to revivify the historical contingencies and political calculations that led to the commissioning of artists to paint permanent murals at this museum and, conversely, the artists’ willingness to participate in this patriotic project, I have divided the chapter into three parts. In the first part, I relay the history of the museum, the political logic of its founding, and the elaboration of a historia patria through the evolution of 80   A Patriotic Sanctuary

its displays over time. In the second part, I focus on the murals within, their relationship to didactic exhibition, and the different visual strategies employed by each artist as he endeavored to balance artistic license with the demands of historical truth. In the third part, I elaborate the dispute between Siqueiros and O’Gorman over the plastic integration of murals with architecture and museum exhibition. Should murals be instruments of patriotic propaganda or political devices? Could mural art effectively critique institutions from within? Should mural aesthetics work to constitute docile citizens or should they attempt to radicalize the viewer’s historical consciousness? Through this three-­part structure, I restore the historical conditions under which these questions were posed, survey the provisional answers suggested by mural artists through their work, and ultimately assess the political limits and potential of mural art for museum practice.

Institutionalizing the Revolutionary Family The Sons of Cuauhtémoc: Historia Patria and the Cultural Politics of Liberalism Chapultepec Castle sits atop the highest hill in Mexico City’s vast leisure zone, Chapultepec Park. The park’s name—a Náhuatl word meaning “grasshopper” (chapulin) “hill” (tepec)—and location originate in the pre-­conquest era, when it served as a royal estate and hunting grounds for Aztec nobility.8 The initial footprint for the castle was built during the colonial period as a small vice-­royal chapel and residence. After independence was achieved (1821), it was expanded and the National Military Academy was installed on site. During the French intervention (1864–67), Emperor Maximilian converted the fortress into his residence by adding a palazzo. After the re-

public was restored, troops were maintained in the military academy intermittently, and the castle became the official presidential residence. Because of its perch high atop “grasshopper hill,” the castle affords a panoramic view of the Valley of Mexico below. For this reason, it has been the literal and metaphorical seat of power for much of its history. However, its most enduring legacy is as the site of the sacrifice of the niños héroes (boy heroes), young cadets who in 1847 gave their lives defending Mexico during the war between Mexico and the United States (1846– 48).9 Their martyrdom is embodied by a heroic youth who, rather than succumb to the forces of the United States, wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leaped to his death from the fortress walls. These valiant “little eagles” have been immortalized as exemplary patriots.10 In 1913, their loyalty was again invoked when military troops from the academy escorted President Francisco I. Madero (1910–13) as he left the castle to confront Victoriano Huerta’s coup. Thus the castle played host to one of the key events in the outbreak of the revolution. By renouncing his claim to the castle and giving it to the public, Cárdenas solidified his populist image. On the occasion of the museum’s twenty-­fifth anniversary, the journalist Manuel Arellano explained the significance of this gesture, writing, “President Cárdenas understood that it was imperative that a place so important to the history of the country be enjoyed by all, and not only by the privileged.”11 At the official inauguration of the museum in 1944, Jaime Torres Bodet, the minister of public education, made the symbolic politics of this project explicit. To a crowd of schoolchildren, military cadets, government officials, and gathered onlookers, he declared: “We are congregated today not as functionaries or journalists, civilians or military men, artists or historians, students or professors, but above all—

and beyond every other consideration—as Mexicans. That is to say: as sons who are gathered in one of the most venerable houses of the national historic family, to review the bonds of a patrimony that concern us all equally [and] to breathe the air of our heroes.”12 Torres Bodet invoked the specter of a hierarchical society only to assuage any resentment over the social inequities of class and education with the patriarchal imaginary of family and brotherhood. In this respect his remarks drew upon the trope of the Revolutionary Family popularized by Alvaro Obregón to reconcile the warring factions of the recent revolution into a naturalized postrevolutionary political order.13 As Thomas Benjamin has argued, Calles institutionalized Obregón’s Revolutionary Family not only through the creation of a political party that claimed in nomenclature and rhetoric to represent la Revolución but also through civic enhancements such as the Monument to the Revolution (figure 5). The latter, a colossal arch constructed out of the remains of Porfirio Díaz’s unfinished Palace of Legislative Power, was adorned with figure groups designed by the social realist sculptor Oliverio Martínez representing national independence, the revolution, the redemption of the peasant, and the redemption of the worker. This progressive sequence—independence, revolution, and redemption (social justice) for Mexico’s popular classes—was routinely asserted as part of a liberal postrevolutionary narrative of Mexican history. Allegorized as family units, these adornments suppressed the personalism of the revolutionary leadership and glorified instead the contributions of soldier, worker, and peasant.14 This strategy has been essential to struggles between liberals and conservatives over the genealogy of the Mexican nation since independence. Reading Mexican history through the nineteenth-­ century monuments that line the Paseo de la Reforma, the historian Enrique Krauze describes the A Patriotic Sanctuary  81

modern nation as a “mestizo family” structured by a dialectic between the “sons of Cuauhtémoc” and the “legacy of Cortés.”15 The former fashioned the liberal narrative of Mexican history, whereby independence from Spain in 1821 represents the birth of a true patria set upon a progressive path toward political autonomy, economic emancipation, and secular republicanism. The latter espoused a conservative version of the past in which the real nation began with the Spanish conquest in 1521. From this perspective, independence augured a regretful decline away from royal Spanish authority and Catholic tradition. The reform period (1857–67) resolved this conflict once and for all on the side of the liberals. The liberal defeat of the conservatives in the War of the Reform (1858–61) and Benito Juárez’s victory over the French (1867) “officially banished the Conservative version of history. . . . From then on,” writes Krauze, “schoolchildren learned historia patria (the history of the fatherland), described by Justo Sierra as ‘a patriotic religion that unites and unifies us’ through ‘holy love’ and ‘deep devotion’ for the (Liberal) heroes.”16 Benedict Anderson has argued that narration is central to the creation of the modern nation-­ state’s “imagined community.”17 Narrating the nation, Anderson argues, is a process by which the past is recalled and retooled through the language and values of the modern nation-­state. Describing French nationalism, he writes, “Frenchness, in the 1880s and forever after, required a process of simultaneous ‘remembering’ and ‘already forgetting’ Saint Bartholomew’s Eve and the Albigensian massacres.”18 The historical specificity of events that took place prior to the formation of the modern nation-­state is forgotten and then remembered as civil strife between fellow Frenchmen rather than as acts of religious atrocity committed by Catholics and Protestants.19 This amnesia performs a double move: it constructs 82   A Patriotic Sanctuary

events from the past through the civic rhetoric of the modern nation-­state while it locates a relatively recent political formation—the nation-­ state—in a deep past. According to Anderson, national narration is structured like an autobiography. Both open with unremembered information, that is, events that precede the coming into consciousness of the subject but are still available for organization into the life story. Both organize events from the past into points of reference that establish the semblance of continuity. Through the literary devices of familial ancestry, awakening, and continuous development, the nation cum bildungsroman becomes naturalized as though it was always there, buried but awaiting discovery. And as many feminist scholars have pointed out, Anderson’s theory is fraternal in both the political and gendered senses of the term.20 Anderson’s account of nation formation is productive insofar as it reminds us that nations are ideological projects. However, his blind spot with respect to questions of gender requires that his theory be modified by the insights of his feminist interlocutors. For example, the feminist political theorist Jacqueline Stevens queries the commonplace assumption that the family is “pre-­political” and that modern political society is fundamentally different from “primitive” societies that ordered their membership according to elaborate kinship rules. She therefore questions the “imagined” nature of national communities elaborated by Anderson. She insists instead on their material unification through what she calls the “birth criteria of membership.”21 The “birth criteria of membership” refers to the very ancient practice of organizing membership via rules that follow from the conditions of one’s birth (in modern parlance, citizenship laws) to structure and delimit any political society, including the modern nation-­state. This counterintuitive argument is that the family,

rather than preceding the modern state as a primordial form of affiliation, is actually an effect of the political legislation of birth. In this way, she calls into question the so-­called modernity of the nation-­state as well as its mechanism of formation, as put forth by Benedict Anderson. Likewise, Stevens queries the abstract nature of narration at the heart of Anderson’s account. For Anderson, part of the utility of exploring narration as constitutive of nationalism is its status as fiction, the logic being that if we can prove that the mechanics of national narration mimic the literary tropes of the realist novel, the coming-­of-­age story, or the autobiography, we can prove that it is constructed. Further, its creative construction relies not on the ancestral blood ties that its promoters insist upon but rather on modern capitalist cultural practices. For Stevens, Anderson doth protest too much. She insists that the nationalist’s appeal to a deep immemorial past follows from the fact that “the nation is and always has been a concept tied to ideas about birth and ancestry.”22 She goes further, pointing out that national narration itself is predicated on the “intergenerational form” instantiated through tropes of birth, lineage, and ancestry. Citing Michael Warner’s concept of “repro culture,” Stevens argues that family, race, and nation are metonymically associated, not mistakenly linked by people confused about the newness of the nation-­state. “Repro culture,” argues Warner, is the “set of institutions and narratives through which your life is understood to gain meaning by its insertion in generational transmission.” From this, Stevens surmises, “Repro culture produces a narrative structure that offers an individual a past and future via intergenerational families.”23 National narration cleaves so neatly to the narrative structure of autobiography because both are metonymically linked through their dependency on notions of being that proceed through

controlled reproduction. This, of course, returns us to the mechanisms of the state, for reproduction and the family form are ultimately determined by it. Familial rhetorics help to naturalize the sex-­gender system that the state enforces as political societies appropriate the generative process of the female body and the script of matrilineality for the compensatory reproduction of (almost always) male authority. For both Stevens and Anderson, the nation is historically and culturally constituted; however, Stevens insists that the familial and ancestral metaphors that structure its “imagined communities” are not felicitous but rather a product of the fact that birth and the state-­legislated family form determine membership, belonging, and the rights of citizenship in any given territory. And the procreative female body is the material and symbolic matrix of this cultural operation. Like Anderson, nationalists routinely disavow the procreative female body even when invoking metaphors of family and intergenerational inheritance. This is why Stevens refers to repro culture as a compensatory appropriation of the generative processes of the female body. Ultimately, it is the liberal subject put forth as deracinated, unsexed, and self-­generated who is the hero of any national narration. And yet as so many national imaginaries reveal, this subject is invariably constituted as a male subject, and within postcolonial contexts, his ethnic makeup will shift depending upon the political moment. Yet despite this disavowal, the procreative power of the female body—the “primordial bond” of blood and kin—haunts the nation and must be routinely repressed in order to maintain the self-­generating claims of the liberal nation-­state. This is particularly evident in the historia patria that characterizes the postrevolutionary national imaginary and its insistence upon the homosocial and competitive bonds of fraternity. A Patriotic Sanctuary  83

Recall that the liberal historian Enrique Krauze describes the “mestizo family” not as a racial formation following from the intermarriage of Spaniards and Indians but rather as “the sons of Cuauhtémoc” versus the “legacy of Cortés.”24 However, as Octavio Paz’s argument in The Labyrinth of Solitude reveals, by midcentury, essayists of the national character were grappling with the costs of this violent and masculinist imaginary. Recall that Paz characterized Mexican nationalism as a pathological dialectic of “withdrawal” from and “return” to the violated “Indian mother” or womb.25 Citing the nineteenth-­century liberal reform as the “great rupture with the Mother”—the nation’s “traditions,” its “pre-­Cortesian cultures”—Paz writes, “This separation was a necessary and inevitable act, because every life that is truly autonomous begins as a break with its family and its past.”26 Echoing Anderson’s claim about the self-­generating nation, Paz states of the modern liberal subject, “He is a man. . . . His beginnings are in his own self.”27 Unlike Anderson, however, Paz argues that the separation from family and the past is a wound that constitutes modern nationalism as pathological and haunts the liberal subject. I will return to the gender politics of the desire to “return” to the maternal womb of the indigenous past, as outlined by Paz, when discussing the National Anthropology Museum in chapter 3. In this chapter, I examine how the national citizen is routinely constituted as a liberal subject at once universal and male, cut off—“withdraw[n]”— from tradition and thus from his family and past. Paz’s observations help to illuminate the insistent homosociality of the historia patria promoted by the state and liberal historians at the National History Museum. For this museum was the preeminent site for imaging/imagining a narrative of national history that could overcome Mexico’s traumatic past by disavowing the violence of the conquest and humiliations of colonization in 84   A Patriotic Sanctuary

favor of the heroic and sui generis birth of a truly modern and liberal nation-­state. Returning now to the rhetoric of the Revolutionary Family in postrevolutionary Mexican political discourse, it should be clear that integrating the factional violence of the revolution into a narrative of national progress required not only the language of fratricide and brotherhood but also the literary devices of familial ancestry and development that comprise a generic life story. Beginning with Calles, successive administrations slowly re-­membered Mexico’s chaotic and violent history into a tale of steady self-­improvement born out of a deep past and moving inexorably toward a glorious modern industrialized future. The institutionalized myth of la Revolución helped postrevolutionary governments to craft a collective memory that converted the armed struggle into but one stage in an ongoing historical process of national becoming. Rather than emphasizing the recentness of the new state or characterizing the revolution as a radical rupture with the past, postrevolutionary politicians increasingly sought to claim a hoary ancestry by reinscribing the political present into the generational inheritance of nineteenth-­century liberalism. Thus, the conquest and ensuing colonial period are remembered not as a separate political epoch that precedes the nation-­state but rather as a fratricidal moment in the nation’s bildungsroman. The historians Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer argue that if Calles converted the political demands that fueled the revolution into an endlessly deferred future promise, Cárdenas added to this the concept of a perpetual revolution.28 They write, “Cárdenas identified certain ‘stages’ in the Revolution as history, which is connected to the present, but not simultaneous with it. A revolutionary tradition was thus established with a progressive present and a future of continuous and ceaseless renovation.”29 Through his

own efforts to, in his words, “perfect our institutional regime,” Cárdenas claimed to be enacting the revolution in the present. Further, he characterized the revolution as the completion of the unfinished process of political independence and liberal reform begun in the nineteenth century. With the accomplishment of these “stages,” the task of the institutionalized revolution was now economic liberation through control over natural resources and corporatist participation of workers and peasants in the new state and ruling party. Ironically, this set the stage for the more conservative turn of his successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46), who converted Cárdenas’s populist call for autonomy into an unapologetic push for industrialization. At his inaugural address, Ávila Camacho claimed that the revolution had satisfied “all essential popular demands. . . . The clamor of the Republic demands now . . . the material and spiritual consolidation of our social achievements, by means of a powerful and prosperous economy.”30 Ávila Camacho inaugurated import-­substitution industrialization (isi), a policy that generated two decades of economic prosperity, the so-­called Mexican Miracle. He also solidified a cultural state that ushered in what some scholars regard as a golden age to “denote a period when lo mexicano still invoked a roughly shared assumption about cultural belonging and political stability under a unifying patriarchy” embodied by the president himself.31 This period of excessive patriotism is well captured in the conclusion of Ávila Camacho’s inaugural address. Aguilar Camín and Meyer summarize his remarks: “At the end of his speech, Avila Camacho benevolently reviewed the history of the nation, regarding it no longer as a struggle but as heritage, not as a source of social friction, but as a fraternal ground of concord: ‘I ask with all the strength of my spirit, of all patriotic Mexicans, of all the people, to keep united, banning all intolerance, all sterile hatred,

in this constructive crusade of national fraternity and grandeur.’”32 While politicians and liberal historians were working out the details of historia patria and its relationship to the perpetual revolution, museographers were attempting to create a National History Museum. The first installation, however, was decidedly illiberal in both the ideology of its displays and its mode of address. It would take another twenty years for the innovators of didactic exhibition to figure out how to put the liberal narrative of Mexico’s history—historia patria—into a compelling and easily legible story, and mural art would play a decisive role in this process. However, before we proceed to this part of the story, it is necessary to review the first iteration of the museum’s exhibitions. For its failure—as pedagogy and spectacle—prompted the integration of mural art and museology.

The National History Museum, Take 1: “National Fraternity and Grandeur” Opened in the middle of Ávila Camacho’s sexenio, the National History Museum embodied the “constructive crusade of national fraternity and grandeur” for which he called. Not only did it house the artifactual past of the nation’s violent history and present it as the shared heritage of a spiritually united patria, but it also put on display the “grandeur” of that past, highlighting, in particular, the imperial tastes of the late nineteenth century. In addition to the former military academy, the castle also housed a vast residential wing built by Emperor Maximilian when he renovated the building and converted it into his palace. Known as the Alcázar, this three-­story palazzo was further enhanced by Porfirio Díaz, who reclaimed it as a presidential residence after a period of disuse. The public and private rooms, luxuriously decorated A Patriotic Sanctuary  85

with silk tapestries, gilded furniture, chinoiserie, silver, porcelain, and tooled-­leather objects, all of European provenance, were opened to the public along with the museum. While the decor testifies to the Francophilia and lavish excesses that enraged the opposition during the Porfiriato, it was not offered to postrevolutionary audiences as an object lesson in the abuses that brought about mass revolt. Rather, the visitor was asked to “admire” the Alcázar and its “beautiful” gardens as testimony to the level of Mexico’s civilization.33 The museum was likewise filled with impressive objects meant to solicit “love and veneration for our mother country.”34 The accent of its main galleries was on heroic military feats and patriotic sacrifice. The installations on the first floor surveyed the conquest, missionaries, arms, viceroys, the War of Independence, independent Mexico (1821–67), maps and prints, heroic flags, the Hall of the Guard, and heraldry (figure 19). The bulk

of the collection derived from the defunct artillery museum, the old city hall, and the convent of St. Francis.35 While organized chronologically, the galleries lacked a narrative thrust and approximated instead period rooms, portrait galleries, and natural history displays with coins and medals arrayed in a taxonomic fashion. In the English-­language guidebook published in 1950, there is a clear emphasis on object provenance and connoisseurship, with each gallery summary accompanied by a short declaration about the historical phenomenon under review and a list of “notable objects.” For example, the entry for the Hall of Missionaries states: “The military conquest was complemented by the religious one at the hands of the Spanish missionaries. Besides Christianity they taught the Indians of the Spanish language, arts and trades. Their work was a strong factor in the solid transplantation of the Spanish culture in the Americas.”36

19 Hall of the Missionaries, c. 1950

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The displays included portraits of missionaries, paintings of baptisms, a baptismal font, a sacristy table, a crucifix, a pulpit, and a holy water basin. The artifacts of the spiritual conquest hail from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth. The paintings were hung on the walls, while the objects were placed along the central axis of the hall. Eighteenth-­century leather-­backed chairs were placed beneath each painting, thus giving the impression of a picture gallery. The Hall of Heraldry, on the other hand, was lined with three rows of framed coats of arms displayed with two glass cases ensconcing orderly displays of medals and military decorations from before and after independence.37 Visitors exited the first floor at the base of a monumental staircase decorated with a painting of republican forces by the academic artist Francisco de P. Mendoza, commissioned in 1905 by Porfirio Díaz for the military academy. Across from this monumental history painting was a 1933 mural by Eduardo Solares entitled Allegory of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Executed for the building when it was still functioning nominally as the presidential residence, the mural was not integrated into the aforementioned exhibitions.38 However, as an extant object, its subject matter and location seem to have been used by museographers as a mediating device between the first and second floor galleries. It is the only reference to the revolution in the museum’s story in the first-­floor galleries, which end at the turn of the twentieth century. A visually chaotic and aesthetically weak work, Solares’s Allegory illustrates Madero’s triumphal entry on horseback into Mexico City (1911) amid a crowd scene populated by peasants and workers brandishing banners emblazoned with his famous slogan, “Effective vote, no reelection.” Behind Madero are clumsy portraits of Venustiano Ca­rranza, Emiliano Zapata, Álvaro Obregón, Calles, and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. This

compendium of figures collapses pre- and postrevolutionary history within the historical present of Madero’s liberal promise. Solares’s style is indebted to Diego Rivera’s social realism, but it betrays none of the latter’s formal complexity, historical density, or didactic clarity. Comparison with later murals on the same themes by Siqueiros and O’Gorman will reveal just how much mural art developed as a form of visual communication, especially with regard to the depiction of historical processes, by the 1960s. At the top of the stairs visitors entered a sequence of rooms dedicated to “artistic manifestations”: religious art, malachites, iconography of the nineteenth century, Mexican painting and pottery, minor arts, apparel, numismatics, jewels, and the history of Mexican culture. The objects in these galleries originated in the departments of history and indigenous ethnography of the former National Museum of Archeology, History, and Ethnography. Their exhibition also reveals the eclectic mix of display styles evident on the first floor. Some, such as the Hall of Numismatics, incorporated elaborate text panels about the Mexican mint, three-­dimensional maps locating Mexico’s mines, and scientific displays chronicling the development of metal smithing from “Aboriginal and European precedents” through currant coinage.39 Others, like the Hall of Malachites, were organized like period rooms to demonstrate the French influence on elite home decoration during the Maximilian Empire.40 Still others appeared like conventional art galleries, elaborating the visual evolution of Pueblo pottery designs, for example, through glass display cases interspersed with decorative screens and genre paintings.41 Only the Hall of Mexican Culture attempted to present a chronological visual history of the nation’s accomplishments in arts and letters from pre-­Hispanic times to the present. However, the emphasis in these galleries, as in those throughA Patriotic Sanctuary  87

out, was on the late colonial period through the nineteenth century. Pre-­conquest and postrevolutionary history received scant attention.42 The display of conspicuous consumption that characterizes the Alcázar, Hall of Missionaries, and Hall of Malachites is reminiscent of princely cabinets, while the ordering of like objects into taxonomic tables or classificatory systems recalls the royal repositories and natural science museums of the eighteenth century. Neither mode of display suggests the profound epistemological shift that Eileen Hooper-­Greenhill associates with the emergence of the public museum in the aftermath of the French Revolution.43 Whereas the private precursors to the public museum sought to ennoble the collector, to put his knowledge and power on display, the modern museum constitutes the visitor as the “subject-­emperor” of the knowledge on display.44 The museologic programs of these earlier institutional forms sought to legitimate or glorify the power of a sovereign or to present specialized knowledge to an intellectual elite. They therefore constituted the viewing subject as a spectator of power and privilege or as a member of a select community rather than conceiving of and targeting a general population “enabled to know.”45 Hooper-­Greenhill’s distinction between different epistemes of display and the subject positions they establish for the viewer helps us to distinguish between the governmental aims of the National History Museum—to teach the public how to see—and its actual practices. For the first iteration of the permanent exhibitions suggests that at some points the museum sought to glorify the state by astounding the viewing public with its grandeur, while at others it presented hierarchical arrangements of “notable objects” more geared toward the connoisseur or military buff than the average citizen seeking information about the link between himself, the objects on display, and national history. 88   A Patriotic Sanctuary

But what is illuminating about this first installation is the parsing of patriotic (read: military) history from cultural history. This would change in subsequent revision. Slowly, cultural objects from the second-­floor galleries would be moved to the first-­floor installations.46 Likewise, the mix of display formats would be streamlined into the singular approach of didactic exhibition. With this new installation style, artifacts were culturally contextualized in displays that communicated “clear and precise lessons,” and which were unified by an overarching historical script that visitors performed as they moved through the galleries.47 The militaristic patriotism of the initial museum was thereby narrativized into a far more effective form of “collective persuasion” that illustrated the nation’s slow maturation from the feudal abuses of colonization through the enlightened modernity of secular republicanism. The same eras of national history were surveyed; however, rather than presenting a fetishistic spectacle of flags, regalia, and official portraiture, the story subsumed militarism within a liberal narrative of national becoming that emphasized the law, social fusion, and liberty. In subsequent incarnations, the museum was no less patriotic. However, its historia patria would be communicated through compelling visual lessons about Mexico’s liberal tradition and the living promise of the revolution. Thus, the emphasis of its historical displays shifted from the late colonial and independence period to the post-­independence period, with a particular focus on the presidency of Benito Juárez and the period of reform (1857–72). While the revolution remained a capstone to the historical narrative, its values, as articulated in the rhetoric of the perpetual revolution, circumscribed the story throughout. Thus, just as in Anderson’s account of national narration, pre-­revolutionary events were remembered from the perspective of postrevolutionary exigencies. The introduction of murals

into the exhibition space enabled these changes. The story of how and why murals became part of the museum’s exhibitionary narrative returns us to the battle between liberal and conservative accounts of the nation’s history. However, whereas nineteenth-­century partisans parried over the historical significance of national independence, their twentieth-­century counterparts argued about the accomplishments of the revolution.48

Museum or Military Academy? A Culture War at the Castle In July of 1953, President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58) announced plans to return the National Military Academy to its former home in Chapultepec Castle. The academy had been relocated in San Jacinto in 1917, when the castle was deemed insufficient for the needs of a modern military. The proposed move would require massive renovations, but more importantly, the museum would have to be relocated, for many an expensive and undesirable proposition. Cortines’s proposal sparked a heated debate that played itself out in the major Mexico City dailies. Advocates like Gonzalo de La Parra, writing for El Universal, commended the president’s “moral and civic composition” for his decision to return the “glorious Military College . . . to Chapultepec Castle,” where, he argued, “it never should have left.” The legacy of the niños héroes, whose sacrifice “was its first chapter of glory,” endowed the castle with a heroic resonance that would “strengthen the loyalty and exalt the patriotism” of contemporary cadets.49 Rosa Castro, writing for the liberal Siempre, attacked this rhetoric as a cynical manipulation of popular sentiment. Claiming that the president was merely the pawn of a group of unscrupulous businessmen who sought to acquire the San Jacinto real estate currently occupied by the mili-

tary, she argued that the “insidious use” of sentimental arguments was merely a publicity campaign organized by “insatiable millionaires.”50 For Castro, the initiative belied a class struggle in which the Porfirian elite vanquished by the revolution sought to reassert their privilege. Reminding her readers that the federal forces against whom the most famous revolutionary leaders fought were trained at the Chapultepec school, Castro argued that honoring their memory would sanctify the undemocratic values of the Porfirian regime. “Gone are the little aristocrats ensconced in military uniform, who, dressed by the people and educated at the cost of the people, only learned to serve despots in order to subject those people.”51 Through her invocation of the revolution and its leaders, Castro asserted that the conversion of the castle into a public museum was the final victory in the people’s struggle against tyranny. Thus, to reinstate the discredited military academy would overturn their will. Instead of calling upon the legacy of the niños héroes to legitimize a return to the past, Castro argued that their memory was best served by the current museum. Castro insisted that rather than be made into a “nest of eagles” (a pun on “little eagles,” an affectionate nickname for the boy heroes), the castle remain a public site where the heroic legacy of Mexico’s most illustrious figures could best serve its civilian population. Castro was not alone; the dominant argument against the military academy was based on the assumption that the current museum was a democratic and patriotic site. Accordingly, Rafael García Granados argued that in addition to the damage the museum and military would incur in such a move, the people would be hurt the most. “The people,” he asserted, “whose access to the castle and its terraces would be prohibited,” would be disadvantaged by the loss of a “site that until today has provided public recreation and an environment for the objective study of the most interA Patriotic Sanctuary  89

esting historical place in our fatherland.”52 The museum’s supporters argued that the National History Museum was a state-­of-­the-­art museum, and the opinions of various European experts in museology were quoted in the press to reinforce its stature. Visitor statistics were cited to scientifically prove its popularity. Finally, as a space of public recreation and education, the museum was hailed as a vital social resource whose availability to the broad population was crucial to the strengthening of national sentiment because in it the unruly public could be tamed into a properly functioning citizenry. As pervasive as this argument was throughout the discourse on postrevolutionary patrimony, a counterargument was lodged that contradicted this characterization of the people’s needs and desires and provided an alternative definition of heritage. The debate over the appropriate veneration of one of the nation’s most sacred monuments reveals a crucial moment in the codification of postrevolutionary cultural values. Rodolfo Casillas, one of the most eloquent supporters of the Cortines proposal, countered the supposed interests of the people with the value of tradition. Implicit in Casillas’s warnings about the perils of not honoring tradition was an indictment of the recent revolution and those who sought to overhaul the entire social structure. For Casillas, tradition was preserved in the “material places where glorious, stoic, and self-­sacrificing deeds were realized.”53 Citing West Point and the British Royal Military Academy as examples of a patriotic respect for tradition, he made a plea for resuscitating Mexico’s own military heritage. Furthermore, he parried with Castro’s narration of the academy’s history, citing all its glories and accomplishments. While Casillas did not call for the destruction of the museum, he maintained that utilizing this important site as a museum was inappropriate. As a valuable material space of tradition, the castle should be 90   A Patriotic Sanctuary

returned to its former use in order that the military cadets, the proper inheritors of this legacy, be inculcated into the heroic patriotism that inspired their forebears. Accordingly, the military academy, as a historical monument, should serve the public as an icon of power and privilege and be accessible to a select few who represent the broader populace with their commitment to the patria. With this argument, he sought to remove the castle from the public domain, where it served as an instrument of civics, claiming that that could occur in specialized spaces constructed for just such a purpose. The castle, on the other hand, should be reincorporated into the disciplinary apparatus of the military and removed from the governmental apparatus of the cultural state. This public battle over the truth of Mexico’s history centered on the role of the recent revolution. Liberal proponents cited the revolution as the final rupture with the legacies of the nation’s colonial past, the completion of the independence project for a modern state, and the fulfillment of the promise of a socially and racially unified citizenry. Conservatives, on the other hand, wanted to place the revolution into a longer history of military struggle, with the Spanish conquest as the original moment of nation formation. They sought to downplay the significance of the revolution as well as the national populism being promoted by the state through the museologic appropriation of the visual ideology first developed in mural art. As this debate makes clear, the truth of the revolution, perpetual or otherwise, was still very much under construction, and culture played an important part in this battle over the postrevolutionary regime of truth. Despite the efforts of state actors who had been laboring to convert the civil war into la Revolución, the postrevolutionary government’s hold on popular truth was still tenuous. Moreover, within the terms of this debate, the liberal embrace of revolutionary values opposed

the ongoing and very real threat of conservative attempts to roll back even a rhetorical commitment to social equality and democracy. It is within this context that we should assess the participation of artists in this museum. By working for the museum, artists were defending public democratic culture over and against elitist notions of culture. This defense of a public museum was also a defense of revolutionary values over and against the persistent attempts on the part of conservatives to return to colonialist and Porfirian cultural values. The rhetorical terms in which this battle over national values was waged would have a determining effect on the way artists chose to represent the historical episodes they were assigned. Each would elect to uphold the liberal and progressive vision of national history rather than use the mural device to critique institutional values. Ultimately the liberal viewpoint prevailed. Relocating the military academy proved to be logistically impractical, so the building’s value as public heritage persevered. As a compromise, a special monument was erected in honor of the niños héroes at the foot of the hill. Despite the museum’s victory, however, members of the press penned a series of deflating critiques of its supposedly state-­of-­the-­art exhibitions. Even those sympathetic with the museum argued that they were ineffective, confusing, and generally inaccessible to the Mexican public. For example, in the second installment of his two-­part editorial, Casillas recounted a day he spent visiting the castle in order to examine the fallacies circulating in the populist accounts of the institution. Describing the bus ride to the top of the hill, he recalled that there were only fourteen people—including the three people in his party—making the trip. Of the other eleven visitors, three were foreign tourists and only three were from the working class. Quoting an impromptu interview, he concluded that

Mexican visitors would prefer it if the museum were easier to access. Furthermore, he noted that the bulk of Mexicans visited the museum during the weekend, and therefore it stood nearly empty throughout the week.54 Despite the fact that the emphasis on military history and the autocratic museologic program at the museum actually supported Casillas’s conservative concept of heritage, his critiques of the museum were directed against the statistical claims of its supporters. Yet he too called upon working-­class sympathies. By emphasizing the inconvenience of the location and the lack of visitors during the workweek, Casillas portrayed the current institution as insensitive to the true needs and rhythms of the very people it claimed to represent. While Casillas’s advocacy of tradition was overturned, his critique of the museum and its installations illuminates discrepancies between the actual museum and the glorified claims made on its behalf. In his description of the inside of the museum, Casillas complained that the exhibitions were poorly lit and confusing and that the majority of objects on display were not accompanied by explanatory labels or text. The proper order was difficult to discern, he noted, because there was no directed route through the museum. And even more damaging was his revelation that guides were provided only for foreign tourists and not Mexican citizens.55 Casillas’s description is certainly a biased one; nonetheless, it helps to frame the subsequent changes and improvements that the museum undertook. As his account reveals, the exhibitions, while roughly chronological, were organized according to various non-­contiguous themes that rendered a coherent experience of the collection difficult. The objects were displayed in eclectic arrays that betrayed a concern with aesthetic appraisal over historical meaning. Furthermore, there was little to help a largely illiterate and unA Patriotic Sanctuary  91

educated public understand what they were looking at. Despite claims at its inauguration that the National History Museum “would teach the people [how] to see,” Casillas’s critique reveals a lack of institutional clarity about how best to train the public’s vision through the sundry artifacts and objects in its collection. At this point the science of museology in Mexico was antiquated, lagging behind developments in France, England, and the United States. Over the course of the 1950s this would change, and by the 1960s, Mexican museums would be hailed internationally as state-­of-­ the-­art institutions. It was at the National History Museum that this transformation of museology would take place, with the aid of mural art. The culture war at the castle helped to clarify the postrevolutionary government’s position on the perpetual revolution and induced artists to support the National History Museum. With the introduction of murals, we see the beginning of the development of didactic exhibition as well as a new role for mural artists—to illustrate historia patria—a role that would extend to the illustration of state-­issued textbooks. This development provoked new questions for muralists about mural art and its relationship to truth. The old debates about mural aesthetics—that is, the work’s relationship to architecture and the viewer—were reignited, only this time with respect to museum exhibition and the citizen-­subject specifically.

Representing La Revolución The National History Museum, Take 2: Didactic Murals and Historia Patria Once the museum’s fate was secured, its installations underwent a series of reorganizations. It was at this point that mural artists began enhancing the displays with paintings describing the significant transitional moments in Mexican history 92   A Patriotic Sanctuary

from the conquest to the revolution. Silvio Zavala, director of the museum from 1946 to 1954, first had the idea to commission murals to compensate for the inadequacies of the museum’s collection. In an interview, he recalled: I had observed on the first floor, in the historical part, that there was a certain disequilibrium between the richness of material at some moments and the poverty at others. The history of Mexico has gone through very strong and painful agitations; therefore, it happened that, precisely in periods of calm and peace, all the objects and works of art were prospering and they could be assembled easily; this produced the disequilibrium that I referred to. Some aspects and epochs were very strongly represented and then declined. . . . To compensate for this, I had the idea . . . to introduce frescoes in the museum galleries.56

Zavala asked the most prominent Mexican muralists to fill in the blanks, so to speak, regarding the most “agitated” yet significant historical moments in Mexico’s history. Orozco executed the first work in 1948, a portable mural on the topic of the reform. To accompany this, Zavala asked Rivera to depict the struggle for independence, but he died before he could begin, and the commission passed to Juan O’Gorman. Siqueiros was commissioned by Zavala’s successor to illustrate the revolution. Subsequent directors reinforced Zavala’s gambit by arranging for additional murals by O’Gorman, González Camarena, and Arnold Belkin for the main exhibition space. While today the museum is full of murals, those integrated into the main sequence of galleries on the first floor are the most important in the development of historia patria and for an analysis of mural art’s relationship to the governmental articulation of the perpetual revolution. The murals at the National History Museum function as more than mere visual addenda to the

displays. They literally reshaped exhibitionary practice. In a 1983 interview, Iker Larrauri, then director of inah and one of Mexico’s internationally esteemed museum practitioners, located the origins of didactic exhibition in the muralist’s eschewal of l’art pour l’art in favor of a social— “anthropological”—approach to their plastic endeavors. From its example, he argued, Mexican museology derived its “intention to create historical consciousness, to consolidate national identity through didactic presentations of national culture . . . that show not only the products of this culture but also the processes that generated them.”57 By the 1950s and 1960s, when artists began to execute permanent murals for the National History Museum, the first and second generations of mural artists had perfected their personal styles. They had also, largely following Rivera’s example, figured out how to narrate historical processes visually and how to integrate their murals into idiosyncratic architectural spaces. Nonetheless, the murals at the National History Museum do not appear uniform. Nor did the artists take a singular approach to realism. Their murals reveal the range of creative approaches and solutions to plastic problems available to an artist working in this visual idiom. Using the architectural spaces they were allocated, each devised a visually arresting representation of the most “agitated” and often contested episodes in Mexican history. Over time, curators elaborated displays around these works flowing seamlessly from one episode to the next, creating visual lessons that to this day teach millions of Mexican schoolchildren, visitors, and tourists how to see historia patria in the sundry artifacts and objects on display. Conceived as a pedagogical space and an “ethical zone” of popular governance in which civic conscience could be cultivated, the National History Museum had always endeavored to provide the visitor with what Toby Miller calls “his-

torical citizenship.”58 Through the selection and display of the “national artifactual past,” Miller explains, history museums control the past by establishing its meaning and how visitors should relate to it.59 However, as an Enlightenment project, the public museum (as opposed to the princely cabinet) “calls out for identification and a mutual, municipal ownership that hails visitors as participants in the collective exercise of power.”60 It is in this sense that the modern museum is a technique of liberal governance and citizenship and not simply a spectacle of authoritarian power like its private precursors. That is, the museum seeks to forge an identification between the visitor and the nation-­ state, wherein the former operates within the interests of the latter out of a sense of belonging rather than force, awe, or coercion. Within all history museums, Miller explains, the visitor is a “citizen-­ addressee” who is hailed by the museum as a subject, not an object, of power and offered “a position in history and a relationship to that ­history.”61 As discussed earlier, the first iteration of the National History Museum failed miserably at this task. Organized according to antiquated programs of display, it appealed to the specialist while addressing the general visitor as a spectator of pseudo-­aristocratic power. With the addition of mural art—a refined technique of governance by the 1950s—and the development of didactic exhibition, the museum achieved the goal of “collective persuasion” that is characteristic of modern history museums as described by Miller. Moreover, the ideological thrust of the improved museum reconciled the legacy of Cortés with that of the sons of Cuauhtémoc by beginning with the conquest—presented as an absolute rupture with the pre-­Cortesian past—and emphasizing progressive social integration by invoking Cuauhtémoc, paradoxically, as the prototype for the deracinated liberal subject guaranteed by the reform. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of A Patriotic Sanctuary  93

the main exhibitions in order to demonstrate how the murals are situated within and by the historical exhibitions and how they intentionally corroborate and thereby enhance the narrative thrust of historia patria on display. While Mexican museographers have continuously updated the displays within the halls of the permanent exhibition, the basic narrative described here has changed very little. (My discussion is based on the installation from the 1990s, which was revamped and enhanced in 2000 as part of a millennium project to overhaul all the museums in Mexico City.) Moreover, because the murals themselves are permanent installations, they continue to anchor the museologic script throughout. Today, the galleries reveal a more sophisticated selection of objects and arrangement, but the basic tenets of didactic exhibition have not changed at all. Nor has the liberal thrust of historia patria been altered to account for the tumultuous events of the 1960s and beyond. That is, objects are still arranged into a coherent institution-­wide script of heroic national becoming, rather than being displayed as works of art or historical artifacts in and of themselves. The particular value of any object, murals included, is subsumed by its place within the overarching patriotic story that begins with the conquest and culminates with the revolution. Thus the murals are situated as technologies of truth, explanatory illustrations, rather than as radical political devices or as historical artifacts of the postrevolutionary cultural ­movement. Fratricide and Resurrection: Camarena’s Frame %%Two murals by Jorge González Camarena frame the main historical exhibitions at the National History Museum: The Fusion of Two Cultures (1963) and The Constitution of 1917 (1967, figures 20 and 21). Executed in oil on canvas, these mural-­scale works are unified by a dominant crim-

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son palette that alternates hues of red, violet, and pink with accents of green and white, thereby invoking the Mexican tricolor. Stylistically, they reveal Camarena’s flinty delineation of form, along with his penchant for monumental and largely decontextualized figures pushed close to the picture plane. Their didactic clarity and comic-­book style reflect his work as an illustrator. His figures loom over the viewer; the sheer power and scale of his execution is impressive no matter what one’s aesthetic preferences. The Fusion of Two Cultures depicts the epic battle and simultaneous deaths of a Mexica Eagle Knight and a conquistador on the body of a fallen horse. There is a strange lack of correspondence between the title (probably given by the museographers) and Camarena’s imagery. “Fusion” implies synthesis and would seem to invoke the biological metaphors of mestizaje. But Camarena has depicted two male warriors who kill and die together. Far from a scene of unity or combination, it is a scene of masculine valor and death. If these two warriors symbolize indigenous and Spanish culture, the painting suggests that both died upon contact. Despite Camarena’s depiction of equal force, the displays that follow make clear that Spanish culture prevailed as they emphasize the spiritual conquest of the Catholic missionaries. The conquest is presented here, as in Anderson’s comments regarding the Albigensian massacres and French nationalism, as fratricide, a battle of cultures within one nación, rather than an episode that predates the invention of the modern nation-­ state. Moreover, his reference to an Eagle Knight conjures the specter of Cuauhtémoc without actually naming him. If Cuauhtémoc (whose name literally means “falling eagle”) falls in this image, he is resurrected in Camarena’s mural for the final hall, but in a distinctly non-­indigenous guise. The objects that frame Camarena’s mural

present actual examples of Mexica battle dress to the viewer’s right and conquistador armor on her left. Spatially, the viewer moves from the pre-­ Hispanic world on the right, past this description of the confrontation of two cultures, and into viceregal Spain. In this way, they embark upon a program—a historical walk—that reproduces the passage from one civilization to another through object lessons along the way. The correspondence between the Spanish armor and the Mexica battle dress on display and those described in the painting establishes the veracity of both representations. The objects authenticate the information presented in the fictive realm of the mural, while Camarena’s image corroborates the historical claims of the artifacts placed around it. After progressing through the museum’s exhibitions, the patron terminates her lesson with Camarena’s The Constitution of 1917. This large-­ scale canvas depicts Venustiano Carranza, the leader of the constitutionalist faction in the revo-

lutionary struggle and president of Mexico from 1916 to 1920. Carranza is seated in the central foreground, captured in the act of drafting the Mexican constitution. Behind and to the right of Ca­rranza, a cadre of Zapatistas marches, while to his left a host of political and military figures gather. Comprised of portraits of prominent intellectuals and members of the liberal middle classes, this latter group represents the Constitutional Congress that Carranza convened in 1917. Their faces slowly blend into the body of an enormous eagle taking flight. This image of national consolidation allegorizes the legal conclusion of the Mexican Revolution as a balance of power between its two most significant political agents: the rural peasantry and the coalition between the urban elite and middle class that formed the liberal intelligentsia and political opposition. The president is shown listening attentively to these groups and signing into law their desires. In this image, the people, symbolized by the

20 Jorge González

Camarena, The Fusion of Two Cultures, 1963

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21 Jorge González Camarena, The Constitution of 1917, 1967

Zapatistas who are marching out of the frame, are presented as the brute force of change, while intellectuals and figureheads actually make up the ascendant new nation—here symbolized through the eagle, a Mexican national symbol. The bloody factional infighting of the revolutionary struggle is thus resolved in a voluntary exchange of power from the people back to their leaders, with the president representing the charismatic figure—or caudillo—of their allegiance. Camarena’s depiction of the resolution of the revolution is entirely homosocial. There is not 96   A Patriotic Sanctuary

even a token soldadera (female soldier or camp follower) among the Zapatistas. Camarena’s imaging of this historical process and moment finds no place for women. Moreover, it de-­emphasizes race as well. While Camarena once again evokes Cuauhtémoc in the image of an eagle taking flight, the Mexica Eagle Knight is recoded as an abstract emblem of the modern nation-­state—the Mexican toponym. In Camarena’s image, the postrevolutionary state is brought into being by the 1917 constitution. This act of law draws centuries of struggle to a close and raises the power of execu-

tive action to the highest degree. The museum’s exhibitions end with this heroic depiction of presidential power, embodied by the strong will of the individual, and legitimated through its proximity to the popular struggle of the Zapatistas. There is the suggestion of ambivalence in Camarena’s depiction of the caudillo. For example, his body is rendered like stone (reminiscent of the statues that frame Rivera’s Rockefeller mural), while all around him seems to fragment as a consequence of contact with his unyielding form. Decrees accumulate on his desk, suggesting the proliferation of paperwork in a bureaucracy. Just above his upheld pen we see a disembodied hand pointing to the firmament. This finger recalls the tapado, the term used to refer to the outgoing president’s ability to tap his successor within the official party system. Is Camarena suggesting that in his unchecked powers, the president has achieved a godlike status? With one foot firmly planted in the capital city and his upraised arm echoing the form of the eagle taking flight, the president appears suspended between the earthly powers conferred upon him by the state and more heavenly aspirations as an embodiment of the nation. If there is ambivalence in this image, Camarena has only intimated it. Ultimately it is up to the viewer to read the work. However, the way that it is positioned by the exhibitions makes it likely that it will be interpreted as a heroic rendering of the signing of the constitution. “Juárez the Taciturn”: Orozco’s Reform %%While Camarena’s murals open and close the exhibitions, frescoes by Orozco and O’Gorman punctuate the overall narrative and depict crucial points of transition in the nation’s unfolding. Orozco’s mural Juárez and the Reform (1948) is the centerpiece of a gallery dedicated to the triumph of the republic over the French intervention and the Maximilian Empire (figure 22). The

monumental visage of a benevolent Benito Juárez looms, disembodied and encircled by allies and enemies. To his left, valiant republican soldiers hoist their symbol, the supreme power battalion flag, and to his right, a solider attacks a monstrous figure in ecclesiastical garb. Below him, the traitors who supported the French intervention now carry the dead body of their slain emperor. As in the fresco, the objects in the gallery fetishize the heroic figure of Juárez rather than providing any information on the social, legal, or military battles that constitute the reform. In addition to a busy historical painting from the nineteenth century by Mendoza depicting the battle of Cinco de Mayo, the mural is surrounded by Juárez’s personal effects: his inaugural suit, his coach, his writing utensils, and the like. Orozco’s mural, like Camarena’s, is iconic. Here the period of reform is collapsed into the decisive act of Maximilian’s execution at the command of a stoic Juárez. An adjacent text panel explains the iconography and historical meaning of the work for visitors unschooled in visual analysis. This fresco is certainly one of the weakest executed by Orozco. Painted at the end of his life, his composition and paint handling lack the dynamic symmetry, expressive power, and pessimistic humanism of his work from the 1930s. Octavio Paz must have had this museum and this fresco in mind when he commented sarcastically that “mural painting belongs to what might be called the Wax Museum of Mexican Nationalism, presided over by the head of Juárez the Taciturn.”62 Juárez, as the embodiment of national will, is spotlighted throughout the museum’s exhibitions. His historico-­symbolic importance is twofold. First and foremost he was president of Mexico during the French intervention (1862–67) and his forces were largely responsible for reclaiming the republic as well as executing Maximilian (1867), an act that brought him grave international critiA Patriotic Sanctuary  97

22 José Clemente Orozco, Juárez and the Reform, 1948

cism but helped to strengthen Mexico’s profile as an independent nation.63 Second, he was of “pure” Zapotec descent and therefore an important emblem of the nobility of Mexico’s indigenous populations and the progress of racial equality.64 Postrevolutionary proponents of mestizaje and indigenismo found in Juárez an ideal icon. While nineteenth-­century representations of the troubled period of his leadership exhibit anxiety over his role in the “barbaric” execution of Maximilian, the heroic treatment this moment receives in the nation’s official history museum reveals that this was no longer the case.65 Within this museum, the significance of the reform is the elevation of a mere Indian to the presidency, and thereby the status of universal subjecthood. 98   A Patriotic Sanctuary

Juárez proves that the liberal reforms achieved the goal of social equality and liberated both Spaniards and Indians alike from the burdens of particularity as they attained the deracinated status of Paz’s solitary modern man. Camarena and Orozco’s murals are large. However, they are more like monumental easel paintings than mural cycles. Each is centrally oriented and focuses on one or two figures that stand in for complex historical processes. They serve as illustrations and remain largely indifferent to the ambulatory visitor; that is, they are structured like large paintings that do not address or even direct the viewer’s gaze. The works by Juan O’Gorman and David Alfaro Siqueiros are more narrative than iconic. Each artist models the ideological process

he describes through compositional strategies and how he orients the work within its architectural space. Both are masters of visual storytelling. But they advocate very different forms of realism— didactic versus dialectic—and adopt different attitudes toward the museum visitor. Both address the viewer’s gaze and direct the movement of her body; however, they do so through different compositional, stylistic, and architectonic methods that have ideological implications for the message each imparts. These differences crystallize the final aesthetic and political battle over the legacy of Mexico’s mural r­ enaissance. The Truth in Painting: O’Gorman’s Independence %%Juan O’Gorman’s Mural of Independence (1960–

61) depicts the struggle from colonial domination to independence that took place from 1795 to 1821 (figure 23). He writes that his mural has three main functions. First, “it tries to show in synthesis, to the Mexican people, the historical events that made possible the birth of nationality” for the purpose of affirming the Mexican viewer’s confidence in her country. Its second function is to “visibly reconstruct the memory of the people with the purpose of coordinating in the mind of the observer, the past with the possibility of a better future.” And finally, his work “tries to explain the social phenomena that make possible historical becoming.”66 O’Gorman’s rationale recalls the promise of the first director that the museum would make the history of Mexico “palpable through time and space” and, in so doing, “teach the public [how] to see.” O’Gorman painted his panoramic fresco on a large concave wall approximately 750 square feet in surface area that spans the entire length of one side of the gallery. One enters the gallery to the left of the mural and exits to its right. The mural’s location and iconography craft the left-­to-­right experience of walking through the gallery as a pro-

gressive movement through time. Having just left galleries detailing viceregal New Spain, one enters this room at the dawn of independence and exits it into a fully realized patria. The mural dominates the gallery and functions as the primary text of its historical lesson. O’Gorman’s figures are nearly life size; however, the mural is slightly raised, so that the figures loom over the viewing subject. When standing before his mural, one’s entire visual field is occupied by its vast historical sweep. However, the meticulous detail of O’Gorman’s style, coupled with the hieratic organization of the iconography, renders this mural incredibly static despite the left-­ to-­right narrative movement of its composition. O’Gorman was a great admirer of Rivera, and while his style is more akin to the Flemish art of the northern Renaissance than social realism, he emulated Rivera’s “ability to express in the clearest and most truthful form, a love for the entirety of the material world.”67 If Siqueiros accused Rivera of immobilizing the viewer with his dense historical “lectures,” O’Gorman’s precious jewellike facture and didactic attitude toward the museumgoer exacerbated the problem. The visual cadence of vertical figures form a kind of wall that holds the viewer at a distance from the events depicted. The focus of the mural is spread evenly across the surface, and while there is a sequence of ideal points of view that allow one to focus on each section, none holds greater interest or receives greater emphasis. O’Gorman’s meticulous detail is compelling but also overwhelming. It induces one to come in close to marvel at the artist’s realism and technique. However, like impressionist paintings, the larger picture dissipates the closer one gets. To properly view this work, one needs to stand back, face the wall, and move laterally. O’Gorman presents the events that span this immense painting as one symbolic day when A Patriotic Sanctuary  99

23 Juan O’Gorman, Mural of Independence, 1960–61

Mexico leaves the darkness of Spanish rule and enters the daybreak of national sovereignty. The mural is organized chronologically into four scenes that begin on the left with colonial oppression, proceed to the philosophical antecedents of independence and then the armed struggle, and culminate on the right with the Congress at Chilpancingo, where, in 1813, Father José María Morelos y Pavón called a congress of partisans to ratify the Declaration of Independence.68 The progress implicit in these contiguous vignettes is allegorized through metaphors of light and the symbolic evolution of natural rights. O’Gorman establishes compositional continuity through three overarching horizontal registers that stratify and unify the mural into a back, middle, and fore100   A Patriotic Sanctuary

ground: iconic landscapes along the top situate the historical events and actors occupying the middle ground and the plight of indigenous people chronicled along the lower edge. For example, the culminating scene is set anachronistically before the white beaches and high-­rise hotels of sunny Acapulco. Built in the 1950s as a modern tourist resort, Acapulco represents independent Mexico’s economic and industrial promise. By visually tracking the degradation of indigenous peoples at the base of his mural, O’Gorman grounds the historical becoming of the nation in the enfranchisement of Indians into the horizontal brotherhood of national citizenship. However, the paternalism of his liberal vision is embodied by the lack of historical agency attrib-

uted to these abject figures. Shown bound and tortured, crucified, and finally naked and crawling on his hands and knees, an anonymous dark-­skinned man gains a ragtag dignity only when he accepts the outstretched hand of a well-­appointed nationalist and enters the ranks of Father Hidalgo’s insurgency. And while weeping women and impoverished mothers surround him and plead for the viewer’s pity, it is the crawling man who represents the indigenous subject, not his female companions. Like Rivera’s, O’Gorman’s figures point and direct our vision; they confront us with their gaze and entreat us to join Hildalgo’s men to defeat Spain, redeem the Indian, and forge a fatherland. He sprinkles trompe l’oeil documents through-

out his historical murals that are oriented toward the viewer so that they can be easily read. For example, in this final episode, he depicts Morelos’s Thoughts of the Nation (Los sentimientos de la nación) and Hidalgo’s Manifesto of Valladolid arrayed on the table for the viewer’s inspection. The document on the far left proclaims: “With the abolition of castes, the Independence Revolution served to unify Creoles, mestizos, Indians, blacks, and mulattos. For in our patria, racial discrimination does not exist.”69 And yet the conspicuous absence of any dark-­skinned figures from the final scene speaks as much to the demography of the Congress at Chilpancingo as to the racial and sexual exclusions in Mexico’s political imaginary. It is certain that several members of the conA Patriotic Sanctuary  101

gress were mestizo, and some, like Vicente Gue­ rrero, are always depicted in ways that emphasize their African heritage. But the message of the final scene here is that these racial particularities— identity politics, in contemporary parlance—are insignificant in independent Mexico. And while O’Gorman does include one historical heroine in the struggle for independence, the overwhelming emphasis is on male leaders, soldiers, and finally the all-­male congress. To ensure legibility, the museum furnishes a lengthy text panel that not only highlights significant historical figures but also explains the allegorical nature of the setting and iconography. The reiteration of this kind of textual support throughout Mexico’s cultural institutions initiates the museum patron into the at-­times hermetic visual language of art. These panels not only instruct the viewer on how to read this and other murals but also contribute to a general orientation with regard to the iconography of Mexican nationalism. The connection between painted symbol and idea that the text explains teaches the viewer to understand visual representation as at once historical information and metaphor. For example, the panel explains that the neoclassical architecture crowned with cupolas represents a fusion of the “double ideological character”—the amalgamation of French philosophy and radical Catholicism, which formed the ideological antecedents of independence—of the figures situated in front of it. Recourse to textual explanation does not weaken the efficacy of muralism; rather, it is precisely this exhibitionary presentation that makes these works legible and authoritative documents of official historical record. All supporting material—text as well as displayed objects—position and inform this work. In return, the painting lends legitimacy, context, and clarification to these same supports. In this way, the didactic exhibition teaches the visitor how to see Mexico’s history in 102   A Patriotic Sanctuary

material culture and the allegorical techniques of mural art. More important than these textual guides, however, is the way the mural represents in painted form the historical artifacts on display around it. In particular, the standard of the Virgin of Guadalupe carried into battle by Father Hidalgo and the flags of different battalions are installed in glass cases directly opposite their images within O’Gorman’s painted narrative. This display strategy helps to contextualize these objects, thereby making them more historically meaningful (and endowing them with a fetishistic character via their authentic link to the independence struggle and the messianic figure of Hidalgo). Likewise, it reinforces the truth claims of O’Gorman’s representation, as the objects confirm the historical accuracy of his mural. O’Gorman made much of this when working on the fresco. In public presentations of his work on site, he relayed in detail the painstaking historical research he conducted in the museum’s archives. For example, in his writings and lectures, he defended his characterization of a gathering of Hidalgo’s followers as a “fiesta” by citing the historian Lucas Alamán’s contemporary account of the event.70 When describing one of the portraits of Hidalgo, he again emphasized his historical accuracy by identifying a portrait by Linati, a contemporary of the priest, as his source.71 In a typical account of one of these public lectures, a reporter for El Tiempo writes: “The historical documentation that O’Gorman has made use of in order to realize his mural was furnished by the National History Museum; a vast iconography of all the paintings and drawings that exist in the museum and which correspond to the historic period of independence.”72 Establishing the iconography’s origin in empirical source material was essential to securing the truth claims of mural art at this museum. Moreover, the murals themselves are

treated throughout Mexico’s regional museum network as historical illustration. For example, one of the portraits in O’Gorman’s Independence mural has been reproduced in a large color photograph and placed on display at the Michoacán regional history museum in Morelia. This fragment depicts the Franciscan archbishop Abad y Queipo holding his letter of 6 September 1813 to Viceroy Félix María Calleja, in which he argued that Hidalgo’s insurrection had to be suppressed. This visual fragment is displayed along with a reproduction of the letter and portraits of independence leaders, Morelos, Hidalgo, and Augustín de Iturbide. In this display, the detail from O’Gorman’s mural stands as a truthful likeness of the archbishop, as visual context for the reproduced letter, and as a visual link to the National History Museum, which helps to insert the history of Michoacán and its regional museum into the history of the nation more broadly.73 In this capacity, O’Gorman’s endeavors to establish mural art as a technology of truth succeeded. Siqueiros’s Revolution, Take 1: Supporting Didactic Exhibition %%Siqueiros was contracted in 1957 by then-­ director Antonio Arriaga to execute a mural on the topic of the revolution in ninety days. At the time of the contract, the artist projected a nine-­ mural cycle beginning with the “Initiation of the Workers’ Movement.” This scene of a “multitude of workers” fighting to “snatch” the Mexican flag from rural guards was to include portraits of labor leaders carrying a dead worker. Various texts and personal objects were to have been displayed in vitrines nearby. The subsequent scenes proceeded as follows: “Decadence of Porfirismo,” “Precursors of the Movement,” “Francisco I. Madero,” “Constitutionalism” (represented by Carranza’s 1917 Constitutional Congress), “Agrarian Reform,” “Workers’ Movement,” “Nationalization of

Petroleum,” and finally “Education.”74 Each panel included numerous portraits of figures associated with the progressive enactment of political, economic, and social independence. While the contract does not specify the formal strategies Siqueiros would have employed to execute this vision of the revolution, it does reveal that the ideology of his cycle was consistent in many ways with the museum’s narrative of national history and thereby la Revolución. For example, his inclusion of Cárdenas’s nationalization of the petroleum industry and his allusion to education, which referred to the free-­textbook program initiated by President Adolfo López Mateos at the start of his sexenio (1958–64), situate the accomplishments of subsequent regimes as the ongoing fulfillment of the revolutionary struggle. Like O’Gorman, who crafted Acapulco as the allegorical embodiment of the independence struggle, Siqueiros intended for these recent events to illustrate the perpetual gains of the revolution. As this brief survey reveals, the murals at the National History Museum seamlessly reinforce the liberal ideology and didactic intent of the permanent exhibition. The artists willingly worked to buttress the claims of the exhibitions and thereby to construct their murals as techniques of truth rather than mere artistic license or partisan politics. The artists and the museographers were all invested in the liberal claims about the revolution. Working at the apex of the Mexican Miracle, all involved were convinced that the nation’s troubles were indeed a thing of the past and that a glorious modern future was just in reach. All, that is, but Siqueiros. For while the mural he proposed corresponded with the historia patria being promoted by his patrons, the mural he actually executed eschews the progressive narrative structure and ideological closure of the didactic exhibitions that precede it. While all muralists deviate from their initial A Patriotic Sanctuary  103

24 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, general view, 1957–65

projections, Siqueiros’s mural is strikingly different from the one he initially proposed. In particular, he reduced the number of scenes, downplayed the centrality of leaders like Madero and Carranza, eliminated all events that postdate the outbreak of the revolution, and eschewed the progressivism his description implies for a dialectical approach. His final mural telescopes this historical process into a thesis and antithesis—the revolutionary phalanx versus the Porfirian vacuum—that the viewer must synthesize visually and ideologically. Moreover, he created a mural that envelops the viewer and dominates the space, making the display of objects within the gallery impossible, for to 104   A Patriotic Sanctuary

do so would mean interrupting the lines of sight and movement necessary for experiencing the entire cycle. Thus the mural ceases to function as a support for didactic exhibition and instead becomes an exhibitionary object/space unto itself that interrupts the foregoing museographic script. Siqueiros’s Revolution, Take 2: Thwarting Didactic Exhibition Porfirianism to the Revolution (1957–65) stretches from the west end of the gallery around a curved wall and into a smaller niche that then turns a corner to extend across a vast north wall (figure 24). The east wall was fashioned into a %%From

similarly scaled niche that faces its counterpart on the west wall. Thus, the imagery along the north wall links the events depicted in the two niches at either end of the gallery. Siqueiros painted this continuous mural in acrylic on canvas over an armature of fiberglass and plywood. Measuring 3,875 square feet, it took the artist seven years to complete, for reasons not entirely having to do with the scale or difficulty of the project. Siqueiros honored his ideological commitment to collective labor by employing a team of artists and assistants throughout the process.75 And, as with his earlier work, he used industrial techniques such as photographic studies, photo projection, and spray guns to achieve an active composition that visu-

ally contrasts revolutionary dynamism with the entrenched stasis of the Díaz regime. Revolutionary imagery spans the west end of the gallery, which begins with a dynamically receding row of slain peasants. A mounted rebel careens toward the viewer, as though propelled by the slaughter of his compatriots (figure 25). Siqueiros used a projector to execute this image; thus from a distance, his body appears to be elongated like a torpedo. As the visitor walks around the wall onto which he has been projected, he seems to move as the lines of perspective shift and the wall arcs around into the niched gallery. As one rounds the corner, one is confronted by a mass of soldiers all facing forward in unison like a dense, immovable

25 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of horse, 1957–65

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26 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of the revolutionary phalanx, 1957–65

block (figure 26). Using a very shallow pictorial space with no horizon line, Siqueiros implies that the popular forces that fought in the revolutionary struggle are infinite. This cadre includes the familiar campesino (armed peasant) with his gun belt, rifle, and hat along with the soldadera (female soldier and camp follower) swathed in socialist red. They are accompanied by the caudillos of the revolution: Obregón, Zapata, Villa, Carranza, Madero, and Calles. However, these figures are subsumed within the mass; their recognizable features— Zapata’s mustache, Villa’s charrería (the regional 106   A Patriotic Sanctuary

dress of the Mexican cowboy), Carranza’s khaki military garb—are just visible behind a trio of unidentified guerillas and the soldadera who lead the pack. A dark-­skinned Zapatista on the left represents peasant movements from the south, a Yaqui in the center represents indigenous resistance in the north, a Norteño in his distinct white cowboy hat represents the mobilized borderlands, and the soldadera represents all the women who participated in the armed struggle. As this description suggests, Siqueiros’s depiction of this historical process deviates from his

peers with respect to both gender and race. While his reference to a soldadera is a mere gesture, within the imaginary constraints of the 1950s and 1960s, he made an attempt to symbolically include women in his depiction of the revolution. Moreover, he attends very closely to ethnic distinctions among the many indigenous populations who participated in the revolutionary struggle. By emphasizing regional, ethnic, and class differentiation, he attempted to de-­emphasize the leadership and to heroize the rank and file. In this respect, his mural is only slightly less masculinist than those by Camarena and O’Gorman. However, it does

not glorify the deracinated universal subject as the great achievement of national liberation movements. Rather, it is the ethnicized peasant and worker whose agency and accomplishments are given center stage. Siqueiros’s scene of infinite human resource is powerfully contrasted on the opposite wall. There, in the exclusive echelons of power, Don Porfirio sits encircled by los científicos (the “scientists,” or the positivist ideologues who filled his cabinet) trampling the constitution while being entertained by coquettish dancers (figure 27, yet another iteration of the prostitute-­as-­corruption

27 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz crushing the constitution underfoot and entertaining his supporters with dancing girls, 1957–65

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motif). Positioned at a distanced remove, Díaz is elevated above the viewer’s line of sight. This centrifugal composition presents the Porfiriato as a black hole. If the soldiers depicted on the west wall push outward, bearing down on the viewer and propelling her forward, the bourgeois grouping on the east wall threatens to suck her into the vortex of authoritarian power. Through iconography and composition, Siqueiros opposes the hierarchical political order of the Porfiriato with the horizontal brotherhood of revolutionary socialism. These two forces clash along the north wall. Siqueiros allegorizes this conflict in a symbolic battle between United States capital and workers’ rights, embodied by William C. Greene and Fernando Palomares (figure 28). These over-­life-­size figures are located in the extreme foreground at the center of the wall-­length composition. Engaged in hand-­to-­hand combat over the Mexican flag, they seem thrust together by crowds of men who move toward them from the far edges of the composition. Those that stream in from the left are comprised of anonymous workers, both male and female; members of the popular intelligentsia, such as the publisher Flores Magón and the graphic illustrator José Guadalupe Posada; and Marxist and anarchist theorists such as Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. Carrying aloft the body of a slain striking worker, they stand behind Palomares and lend him ideological and physical support. From the right, a phalanx of federales (federal troops) marches in to do Díaz’s bidding and bust the strike. Greene grasps greedily at the flag even as he is about to be pushed out of the frame by a more powerful Palomares. While the event depicted is fictional, the mural refers to the 1906 Cananea Consolidated Copper Mine strike. Mexican workers struck to demand pay equity with the miners from the 108   A Patriotic Sanctuary

United States working alongside them.76 Owned by William C. Greene, the mine typified foreign possession of Mexico’s natural resources and industry during the Díaz regime. Díaz’s favorable policies toward foreign capital motivated the labor migrants working in industries along the border between the United States and Mexico to join up with the Northern Division as the revolution began. The Mexican government’s suppression of the strike with armed forces made apparent its collusion with foreign interest over and against its own people. Thus this strike is a fitting emblem of the conflict of class values that this mural recalls. Painted across five walls, Siqueiros’s mural surrounds the viewer with a dynamic and overwhelming image. The ideological confrontation depicted within was meant to catalyze its viewers by incorporating them into its representational space. The compositional vitality of this cycle contrasts sharply with the other murals in the museum. Spatially, there is no clear place where the mural begins or ends, and no singular narrative or museographic script for the visitor to perform. One can begin along the west wall and follow the marshaling revolutionaries into their clash with the Porfirian federales. Or one can begin with Díaz’s cabinet on the east wall and head into the revolutionary onslaught. The most logical way to experience the mural is to view the figure on horseback from the entrance and then follow his directional lead toward the north wall. Once there, the visitor is positioned between the revolution and the Porfiriato, experiencing the dynamic push and pull of Siqueiros’s composition while confronting the brutal battle at its core. No matter how one walks through the gallery, the visual structure of the work creates a dynamic tension that is never resolved. As the foregoing description suggests, in the final iteration of his mural, Siqueiros attempted

to thwart the ideological thrust of the didactic exhibitions on site. In this respect, his murals represent an early form of institutional critique. These changes beg the question why. We might surmise that Siqueiros’s original description for his patron was disingenuous. However, nothing in the archive suggests that the artist pulled a bait and switch. Rather, his correspondence with Arriaga indicates that he intended to make a mural that would support the displays and render the revolution within the prevailing terms of la Revolución. Siqueiros’s change of heart followed from the convergence of his growing doubts about mural art’s problematic role in patriotic nationalism, his own failed attempts to revolutionize the medium, and his personal experiences with censorship and a repressive state. To better appreciate the braiding of these historically contingent threads, we need to examine Siqueiros’s participation in an earlier state project, the creation of University City (Ciudad Universitaria [cu]), the new campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [unam]), and the dispute he initiated there with his peer Juan O’Gorman. The roots of Siqueiros’s discontent with the perpetual revolution and the forms of citizenship it implied can be discerned in his reaction to the failures of this project.

Critiquing the Perpetual Revolution The Siqueiros-­O’Gorman Dispute: Historia Patria and the Mexican Miracle The cu was part of the intensified construction of public works during the modernizing presidency of Miguel Alemán (1947–52).77 Built between 1950 and 1952 by teams of over 150 architects, engineers, and designers, the campus was designed according to the principles of modern urbanism

pioneered by Le Corbusier.78 However, its location on the lava-­covered ruins of Cuicuilco, a pre-­ Columbian city, and its layout also nodded to pre-­ Hispanic city planning. In particular, its central axis and stepped structure refer to the Calzada de los Muertos (Way of the Dead) at Teotihuacán, while the asymmetrical organization of the buildings along a central plaza draw upon the Zapotec city plan at Monte Albán.79 Thus the campus proclaimed a thoroughly modern Mexico rooted in and continuous with its pre-­Columbian origins but also a part of the cosmopolitan internationalism of the industrial world. (This will be discussed further in chapter 3.) Rivera, Siqueiros, O’Gorman, José Chávez Morado, and Francisco Eppens each worked with architectural teams to convert the glass, cement, and steel structures of the modern campus into billboards for the revolutionary spirit of the modernizing state.80 The artists viewed this as an opportunity to create a new form of plastic integration whereby the distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architecture could be broken down so as to create a new, totally integrated work of social art.81 Siqueiros in particular had been waiting for the opportunity to bring mural art outdoors. He had experimented with an outdoor mural in 1932, when he painted Tropical America above Olvera Street in Los Angeles.82 In his 1934 dispute with Rivera, he had routinely criticized the first phase of mural art because its artists were working “exclusively within the interiors of grand buildings.”83 Thus, the cu project represented his first real opportunity to realize the dream of a truly public mural art. Rivera, O’Gorman, Chávez Morado, and Eppens all opted for mosaics of colored stones either inlayed or executed in low relief on the exterior walls of the functionalist structures. Siqueiros, on the other hand, experimented with new media to create a polychromed surface for an immense A Patriotic Sanctuary  109

28 David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution,

detail of the encounter of the armies, 1957–65

sculpted painting crafted from a cement-­and-­ metal armature. He used scale, color, and polyangular perspective to undermine the planer orientation of the architecture so as to address the visual radius of a mobile spectator with an active rather than static composition. From the moment that the designs of the other artists began to take shape, Siqueiros used the press and his own Center for Modern Realist Art to criticize their anachronistic medium, their ornamental and decorative approach to plastic integration, and the academic nationalism of their styles. While Siqueiros leveled criticism at all the other artists, O’Gorman was his primary target in the public debate over the success of the cu project.84 As a prominent proponent of functionalist architecture, O’Gorman had made his name building primary schools for the sep throughout the 1930s in this modernist idiom. By the 1950s, however, he had become weary of the universalism of the so-­called international style. He recognized in this claim the imposition of the corporate cultural values of the United States—what he called a “coca-­colonization”—that threatened Mexican tradition and national autonomy.85 Calling for an “organic architecture” along the lines of that pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright, he argued that functionalism needed to be harmonized with the natural environment and regional character of its different locations.86 For Mexico, O’Gorman advocated what he called a “naturalist realism” based in pre-­Hispanic architectural principles and the popular traditions of the Mexican people.87 Like Siqueiros, O’Gorman viewed the cu project as a chance to enact his aesthetico-­ political convictions. However, each artist took a different approach to tradition, history, and the viewing s­ ubject. For his History of Mexico, O’Gorman decorated all four walls of the massive windowless cement main library with a mosaic “codex” elabo112   A Patriotic Sanctuary

rating Mexican history and scientific progress through symbols (figure 29).88 He dedicated the primary orientation—the north-­facing surface— to pre-­Hispanic Mexico, and the southern exposure to the colonial era, while using the smaller east and west sides for modern Mexico. Mexico’s historical epochs are brought together around the theme of scientific discovery and progress. The pre-­Hispanic mosaics focus on cosmic cycles. Covered with emblems derived from codices, they represent the four coordinates dispersed around a central axis that combines crucifixion imagery with Aztec iconography, anchored at its base by the Aztec toponym for Tenochtitlán—an eagle alighting upon a cactus with a serpent in its beak. The colonial era mosaics focus on Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmology. The universe is symbolized by the zodiac in two circles located on either side of a central axis that mirrors the one on the north side; only here, the axis is crowned by the double-­headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire. These motifs are carried through in the mosaics on the east and west sides (figure 30). For example, figures symbolizing campesinos and workers represent the accomplishments of the revolution. They occupy the political and economic base for the harnessing of physical energy, emblematized by the atom, which in turn enables the rebirth of Cuauhtémoc’s spirit, symbolized by an Eagle Knight crowning the composition. Through his multifarious eagle iconography, O’Gorman integrated not only the unam’s emblem into his composition but also Mexico’s national symbol and its recoding as Cuauhtémoc resurrected. Siqueiros’s monumental sculpted painting spans the entire length of the northern and southern facades along the rectangular horizontal base of the rector’s tower.89 A third smaller image of the unam eagle motif is located higher up on the eastern face of the tower itself. Collectively en-

29 Juan O’Gorman,

History of Mexico, 1950–52

30 Juan O’Gorman,

detail of History of Mexico, 1950–52

titled The People to the University, the University to the People, his mural focuses on generalized figures striving with outstretched arms toward an unknown future or opportunity (figure 31). The southern exposure depicts several large male students holding books, a compass, and an architectural model in their hands. One looks back as though to welcome others not yet seen into the meritocratic promise of public education. Smaller figures march en masse and carry flags along the upper left register. In the many articles Siqueiros published while the projects were underway, he critiques the “tendencies” of his peers in order to elaborate his own artistic proposition.90 In particular, he characterizes O’Gorman’s murals as symmetrical, visually static, and materially anachronistic (the same criticism he made of Rivera’s murals in their 1933–34 dispute). About his own, he notes their dynamic asymmetry, sense of movement, and use of modern techniques. He takes O’Gorman to task for visually reinforcing rather than activating the planer surfaces of the library’s walls. And he ridicules the artist’s desire to “Mexicanize these structures by dressing them up in little Mexican kilts and shirts, like a typical American tourist who has visited Cuernavaca.”91 Siqueiros argues that O’Gorman’s attempt to nationalize the international style resulted in yet another iteration of the “Mexican curio” he noted in Rivera’s mural art. Not only does his “organic architecture” fail as national expression, according to Siqueiros, but it is as inauthentic as touristic kitsch: a “gringa dressed up like a china poblana.”92 Siqueiros’s attack was extremely personal, conjuring the O’Gorman family’s Irish heritage as subtext for his failed nationalism and impugning his masculinity by associating his aesthetic with the feminine. It was this kind of attack that probably motivated O’Gorman to index both his manhood and Mexicanness to his aesthetic choices 114   A Patriotic Sanctuary

when defending his National History Museum mural. In response to his critics, he writes: To many modern painters and critics the Mural of Independence looks like a photographic almanac (despite the fact that it would have been impossible to realize it in photographic methods, nor as a photomontage). . . . I was trying fundamentally to make a work of didactic character and its realization required more than anything a correct interpretation with respect to the popular taste of Mexico. As the author of this mural, it is my major desire to have made a painting that has the approbation of the people of my country, in this way I can pay respects with my work to those who with their work made possible my existence as a man and as a Mexican.93

Here O’Gorman attempts not only to craft his anachronistic style as modern via a negative comparison with photography but also to insist that it is in line with the “popular taste of Mexico,” and thereby an expression of and for the people. This kind of claim recalls Toby Miller’s arguments about the governmental pursuit of the popular. O’Gorman’s recourse to the language of labor speaks to his savvy attempt to link his artistic work with the proletarian politics of postrevolutionary cultural nationalism without ever explicitly mentioning the revolution or social realism. In this way, his remarks reflect the ongoing attempts to craft mural art as an expression of popular revolutionary will while also being careful not to invoke the culturally passé—and, by the 1960s, politically dangerous—rhetoric of radical socialism. However cruel and sexist Siqueiros’s attacks on O’Gorman were, they were motivated by a political conviction about the potential for historicism to convert mural art into a formalist exercise and ultimately state propaganda. Siqueiros traced the current of O’Gorman’s decorative national-

31 David Alfaro Siqueiros, The People to the University,

the University to the People, 1950–52

ism to the ornamental indigenismo of Díaz’s civic projects. Comparing the “neo-­Aztecism” of his library murals to the coyote masks and feathered serpents adorning the Palace of Fine Arts—“built by European architects”—he implies that O’Gorman’s “Mexicanism” is handmaiden to an elite, colonizing, and ultimately authoritarian power.94 Contrasting his own neorealism with O’Gorman’s neoclassicism, Siqueiros writes: “I am not going to look for my nationalism in the museum. . . . My Mexicanism is and will be the fruit of a strict attachment to Mexican functionality . . . but the Mexicanness of today . . . of the year 1952, and not of pre-­history. . . . Naturally, this Mexicanism does not exclude the observation and the knowledge of the sum of our traditions.”95 Siqueiros’s clarification of his nationalism is explicitly a defense of presentism over historicism, and his reference to the museum as the site of a regressive nationalism is telling. For him, the political function of mural art is neither to foster blind patriotism nor to stylize cultural inheritance into a fetishistic spectacle of Mexico’s past glory. Rather, mural art should address the complexities of the present—what he deemed the “precise political moment” in his dispute with Rivera—so as to generate a more equitable future. With this argument, Siqueiros attempted to point out the convergence between O’Gorman’s project and the ideology of the Mexican state. This ideology linked historical consciousness with patriotism and industrial progress and was directly implicated in growing state repression of dissent. The cu project embodied this ideology; however, its most explicit articulation can be discerned in the free textbooks circulated by the sep through a program inaugurated by Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) at the start of his term. The third-­level primer, distributed in 1961, makes the hyper-­nationalism and political ideology of historical education in the 1950s and 1960s explicit 116   A Patriotic Sanctuary

(figure 32).96 After a preface that explains how the enlightened educational policy of the López Mateos administration is responsible for the book “you hold in your hands,” the text begins: “Friends of the Third Year: We have been born in a beautiful country called Mexico.”97 Thereafter it intertwines three themes. The first is the obligation of the citizen to “Love,” “Honor,” and “Defend” the Patria.98 The second is Mexican history from pre-­Hispanic civilization through the revolution. The third is the accomplishments of the modern nation-­state. To the question “Why do we study?” the text replies: “to better love our patria, to become good citizens.”99 The text explains the student’s democratic obligations to develop civic virtues such as “telling the truth,” “expressing noble sentiments,” maintaining good hygiene, working hard, and cooperating with others.100 These personal obligations model the acts of a good state, for in the section on civics the text boasts of Mexico’s membership in the UN and the Organization of American States, its good relations with other nations, and its commitment to social justice.101 In one of many reiterations of this claim, the brief section on the revolution focuses mainly on articles 123 and 127 of the 1917 constitution. The text ends with a dossier of claims about López Mateos’s accomplishments, such as the distribution of free textbooks, the expansion of social security, the completion of a highway system, and the industrialization of manufacturing.102 All public primary education is fundamentally patriotic and concerned with fashioning “well-­tempered citizens.”103 What is significant here, however, is the rhetorical link between historical consciousness, good citizenship, and industrial progress. Together, these underpin the official ideology of the Mexican Miracle. And while O’Gorman’s cu project recapitulates the claims of historia patria nearly verbatim, Siqueiros tries

32 Illustration of the “Historic Stages of Mexico” published in

Mi libro de tercer año: Historia y civismo, August 1960

to unsettle them. In O’Gorman’s mural there is an implicit argument about history, citizenship, and national progress. Love of patria is cultivated through historic consciousness, while technological modernity is the fruit of popular struggle. Not only did Siqueiros eschew an indigenist nationalism that constructs modernization as the embodiment of values latent in “deep Mexico,” but he also refused to depict the revolution with images of industrialization as the fulfillment of its promise. He makes this quite literal on the northern wall of his rectory mural, where he constructed a single powerful arm with multiple grasping hands pointing toward a cornerstone inscribed with the dates 1520, 1810, 1857, 1910, and 19?? (figure 33). Re-

ferring to the conquest, independence, the liberal reform of the constitution, and the revolution, the first four dates invoke the official political chronology of historia patria. However, the question marks suggest that the outcome of Mexico’s struggle for autonomy and social justice is still unknown. Through both his mural and his criticism of O’Gorman’s style and technique, Siqueiros made a very different claim about history, citizenship, and modernity. Contemporary viewers, Siqueiros notes, are mobile, often motorized; they view buildings from great distances. Likewise, modern architecture is scaled differently from buildings past. Thus a public mural art that speaks from its A Patriotic Sanctuary  117

exteriors must approximate its scale, make use of multiple points of perspective, and avail itself of new technology to develop the materials, colors, and supports necessary for producing an effective and sustainable public art.104 For Siqueiros, mural art honors its origins and the nation’s past by improving its democratic capacities to communicate with the public. Therefore Siqueiros’s cu mural celebrates public access to higher education as a means to social progress. O’Gorman’s, on the other hand, lionizes the nation’s past as prelude to technological progress. Siqueiros strives to modernize Mexico in the political, social, and technological sense of the term; O’Gorman seeks to Mexicanize modernity. Ultimately both artists considered their cu projects failures. O’Gorman’s mosaics are per-

haps the most famous and spectacular exterior murals in Mexico, but his ornate aesthetic makes them nearly illegible. Today they do indeed seem like functionalist ornament, converting a brutalist work of architecture into something cosmetically “Mexican.” Siqueiros’s murals for the rectory tower are large and simple, but they lack the dynamic visual qualities of his indoor cycles. Rather than inspiring viewers, they seem rather unremarkable despite the artist’s success at developing a viable new medium for outdoor mural art. In the end, the artistic and ideological failures of the cu mural projects demonstrate the difficulty of using architecture as a support for public art. These buildings maintain their international-­ style identities and thereby render the murals on their exteriors mere adornments. The plastic

33 Detail of David Alfaro Siqueiros, The People to the University, the University to the People, 1950–52

118   A Patriotic Sanctuary

integration of painting, sculpture, and architecture turned out to be impossible without the subordination of one art form to the others. Neither Siqueiros nor O’Gorman would execute an exterior mural of this scale again, although both would continue to experiment with “total works of art”—O’Gorman at the home he built in the lava fields outside Mexico City (1953–56), and Siqueiros at his privately financed Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, built as part of the Hotel de México complex (1967–72). However, in his dispute with O’Gorman, Siqueiros solidified his arguments about the politics of form, in which the way that mural art engages architecture determines the historical subjectivity and therefore the forms of citizenship it enacts. He would make very similar arguments about the need for mural art to challenge museum space and actively engage the visitor when executing his murals at the National History Museum a decade later. However, by the early 1960s, when both he and O’Gorman were working at the museum, his argument had become more urgent.

Critiquing the Mexican Miracle: Siqueiros’s Undecided Revolution By the early 1960s isi was showing signs of failure.105 Despite the rhetoric of the economic miracle, since the late 1940s Mexican industry had been faltering under protectionism and unable to compete on the international market. Likewise, the agricultural sector had stagnated and no longer produced enough for domestic consumption, leading to the importation of food along with capital goods. The initial surplus generated by foreign investment was rapidly being depleted, and Mexico entered into cycles of inflation that led to a series of crippling peso devaluations in 1948 and 1954. To stem inflation, the government

froze wages and prices as part of a new policy of “stabilizing development.” In an attempt to expand domestic markets and exports, the state increased its subsidy of industry by establishing a para-­governmental sector of publicly owned enterprises, most notably the petroleum and electricity industries. As a result of the policy of “stabilizing development,” the state exerted more and more control over the economy, labor, and politics. The ruling party sought to rein in the labor unions within its corporatist structure by installing charros (leaders who favored management over labor) in leadership positions. By the late 1950s, public-­sector trade unions had begun to strike in protest over low wages. While teachers, oil workers, telegraph employees, and electricians participated in these strikes, the most powerful and effective actions were carried out by the rail workers’ union. In 1954 members of the National Railroad Workers Trade Union (Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Republica Mexicana) began to take direct action against the official leadership in search of better wages for workers.106 Then, in 1958, they cast off their charro, and under the independent leadersip of Demetrio Vallejo (representative of Local 13 of the union) and Valentín Campa (a Communist Party agitator), called a series of strikes in 1959 to negotiate another salary increase.107 The government and union agreed on an increase, but the union threatened to strike again in support of two independent railroad unions that had been left out of the negotiations. Despite the fact that the government had declared a strike illegal, the entire rail system struck in solidarity with the two locals paralyzing the country during Holy Week festivities.108 Instead of returning to the negotiating table, the government sent in the military to bust the strike and arrested as many as 13,000 union members in its initial sweep. The leadership was given prison sentences of between four and fourA Patriotic Sanctuary  119

teen years. Many were tortured while incarcerated in Mexico’s dreaded Lecumberri prison, and some died in the process.109A government puppet replaced Vallejo and Campa, and the independent union movement was effectively quashed. The state’s violent response to labor unrest represented a definitive shift in postrevolutionary policy. Since the founding of the ruling party in 1929, the government had tolerated periodic opposition as a strategy of containment. However, the brutal response of the rail workers’ strike brought state repression into the open and inaugurated a period of authoritarianism that culminated in the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco and continued covertly throughout the following decades. López Mateos invoked Article 145 of the penal code to bust the strike. This law, enacted by Ávila Camacho to combat fascism during World War II, declared any opposition to the government an act of “social dissolution” and therefore an arrestable offense. By the late 1950s, the pervasive fear of arrest had effectively gagged the press, which permitted the easy manipulation of a generally uninformed public by a state that routinely raised the specter of communist plots to defame the trade unions and popular struggles for social justice. Outraged by the state’s brutality and frustrated with the press’s complicity in the wake of the suppression of the rail workers’ strike, Siqueiros toured the country giving lectures in support of the union’s right to strike and agitating against Article 145 as a violation of the right to free expression. In one such speech delivered in January of 1960 while the artist was in Caracas, Venezuela, he lamented, “My friends . . . the Mexico you love is no longer what it was, it is not what the official pseudo-­revolutionary propaganda of the last twenty years would have you believe.”110 Claiming that the postrevolutionary government was in the hands of “a new, reactionary bourgeois class,” Siqueiros argued that the government’s cultural 120   A Patriotic Sanctuary

agencies were capitulating to the imperialism of the United States, renouncing the populist orientation of Mexican muralism, and colluding in the censorship of art.111 He was referring both to the controversy over Diego Rivera’s Hotel Prado mural (1947)112 and to his own experience completing one of Rivera’s unfinished commissions for the National Association of Actors (Asociación Nacional de Actores [anda]). The anda asked Siqueiros to paint a mural cycle on the history of theater and cinema in Mexico. He proposed to limit the subject to “scenic art in Mexico today, with the history of the theater to be used as the chronological framework.”113 In the section of the mural devoted to the theme of “tragedy,” he chose to depict the recent rail workers’ strike in an attempt to combat the silence of the press and the “widespread” terror affecting intellectuals.114 Describing his anda mural, he writes: “I painted this situation as a concrete expression of tragedy. I painted the aggression of the police and the military against the Mexican workers’ movement. The aggression of soldiers and police blindly obeying the orders of their immediate chiefs, who were in essence obeying the orders of the American State Department, who received theirs from the great monopolies who oppressed the whole world.”115 As a consequence of this editorializing, work on the mural was stopped and ultimately it was covered up. Then, in August of 1960, the artist was arrested under Article 145 and sent to Lecumberri for four years.116 This period of incarceration took place in the midst of his work at Chapultepec Castle. He would not resume painting until 1964, and the mural would be officially inaugurated in 1966, eight years after it was commissioned. What becomes immediately clear when one is considering the mural within this context is that Siqueiros’s National History Museum mural is a political alle-

gory about the failures of the Mexican Miracle. Instead of depicting the rail workers’ strike directly, as he had in his anda murals, Siqueiros opted instead to craft the Cananea copper strike as its historical antecedent and thereby convert the Díaz regime into a proxy for the López Mateos administration. He thereby reverted to historical allegory, despite his reservations about historicism, in order to get around state censorship. Siqueiros drew analogies between the influence of United States capitalists during the Porfiriato— the figure of William C. Greene—and the foreign investment encouraged by isi. Just as Díaz had sent in federales to put down a strike for fair wages in 1906, López Mateos had sent in the military to brutally suppress the rail workers in 1959. Thus the visual tensions in the mural that obfuscate formal or ideological resolution were intended to provoke a complacent public into an identification with popular struggle for social justice rather than to affirm the perpetual revolution.117 As Siqueiros completed his murals in 1966, he reiterated his arguments from the early 1950s; only now he linked the politics of form to the question of truth in a realist mural art. And here it is important to recall the emphasis O’Gorman placed on the empirical verity of his Mural of Independence at the museum. In a public lecture he delivered in 1966 (which was subsequently transcribed and published in the Sunday supplement of El Día), Siqueiros explains in telling detail the significance of his National History Museum mural for this project. Regarding the mural’s theme, he writes that it is “subordinated, naturally, to the museologic function of the room.”118 However, he follows this assertion with the rhetorical question “What could be made here that would not be a documentary painting?” He answers his own question, responding, “I understood that I would have to make something that only the Mexican muralist movement was capable of producing,

a grand documentary painting with portraits of people whose appearance should be as faithful to the truth as possible.”119 For Siqueiros, truth is linked to the human form and thereby realism—not, however, a realism that appealed to an objective historical empiricism. He argues that the truth in painting requires a rejection of the anti-­humanist ethos of formalism, or an art that “considered the representation of a bottle with its cork” more important than the representation of a human being.120 In an obvious swipe at cubism and its influence on the postwar discourse on painting and its preference for abstraction, Siqueiros reiterates his defense of a politicized realism and reminds his audience that even the abstract expressionist paintings of the “talented Jackson Pollock” had their origins in his Experimental Workshop and the culture of commitment of the 1930s.121 Siqueiros then recalls the origins of mural art, arguing that during its initial phase, artists merely succeeded in making “large paintings.”122 Continuing his call for a second phase, he advocates a mural art that will evolve along with technology and science—in particular, advances in chemistry, physics, and optics. His mural, unlike those of his peers in the early movement, was a unified whole, not a sequence of images, he claims. To accomplish this, he eschewed traditional perspective in favor of a dynamic composition based on the principles of optical experience and calibrated to adjust to the visitor’s movement. He writes: “In the Gallery of the Revolution there will be no seats or benches for sitting; this is the same museum where the public collects in front of a painting by Juan or a painting by Enrique and stays put for a long time observing it. A mural must make the spectator walk, it has to move him, because in an amplified platform every wall becomes active, and he who observes it should enter through activity, physical activity and spiritual activity.”123 A Patriotic Sanctuary  121

A dialectical mural, according to Siqueiros, will cause the spectator to understand that “he is an active being” and thus “his human potential will multiply.”124 Siqueiros’s advocacy of a “new humanism” in muralism was both a defense of realism against the school of Paris and an attempt to rearticulate the cold war discourse on freedom. By the 1960s, Siqueiros had shifted from a defense of muralism rooted in socialist political struggle to a defense of the human tradition. However, his remarks betray more than a capitulation to cold war rhetoric. He was also crafting a defense of truth in painting that could combat the propagandistic turn of muralists during the Mexican Miracle, and the tendency of the museum to position murals as documentary truth rather than partisan politics. For Siqueiros, the truth of the revolution is social antagonism rather than unity. As one critic argued at the time, Siqueiros paints “a Revolution that does not end by snatching from its enemies the flag of the patria, since the struggle (in the mural) continues undecided.”125 Thus we might conclude that Siqueiros’s National History Museum murals counter the perpetual revolution with the undecided revolution. The historian Barry Carr notes, however, that despite Siqueiros’s radical claims, he unproblematically represents revolutionary forces as an “army of the people.”126 By placing Zapata, Carranza, and Madero together, Carr concludes, the mural “reflects the historicist thrust of the official ideology of the Mexican revolution, which is fond of blurring the contradictory experiences of and projects of different figures in the Revolutionary Pantheon.”127 Carr attributes Siqueiros’s ideological failure to the “contradictory currents in the heritage of Marxism” and, in particular, to the Mexican Left’s appropriation of nationalist discourse.128 In this respect, Siqueiros’s National History Museum mural is no different from Rivera’s sep murals. Both cycles obfuscate the internecine struggles of the civil war 122   A Patriotic Sanctuary

in order to craft the revolution as a fundamentally unified popular struggle for national sovereignty and ultimately proletarian gains. Like their federal patrons, mural artists sought to claim the legacy of the revolution for their own agenda. And as Paz notes, “the divergent interests of the government and of the painters coincided on [this] essential point.”129 However, neither Paz nor Carr takes into consideration Siqueiros’s formal and compositional challenges to the architecture, exhibitions, and viewing subject. Moreover, neither attends to the historical context in which this mural was executed. Were they to do so, Siqueiros’s failure, or more broadly that of mural art, would be revealed as more than simply a blind spot in the Mexican uptake of Marxist ideology. It was also a failure of museology. The curators could have situated Siqueiros’s mural within the present political crisis of the Mexican Miracle. They could have elaborated the political ideology of his formal and compositional choices for the viewer. Or they could have taken their cue from Siqueiros’s truth and changed the foregoing exhibitions to reflect social antagonism rather than democratic progress. This would, of course, have been a radical choice for the National History Museum, and one would be hard pressed to find any history museum worldwide that approaches the national past in this way. Nonetheless, it was (and is) an option open to curators, and it remains an unexplored potentiality of mural art’s legacy for museum practice.

Neither Truth nor Politics: A “Patriotic Sanctuary” after All? Unfortunately for mural art, the practitioners of didactic exhibition refused to heed Siqueiros’s challenge to the historical consciousness and narrative style pioneered by Rivera and ossified in

museum practice. They instead have enacted narrative closure by situating Siqueiros’s gallery outside the contiguous system of halls that constitute the first-­floor exhibitions. To access it, one exits the historical past of the nation, crosses the lobby, and enters a room dedicated to the revolution. As the final word, this gallery deposits the viewer in the present, which is characterized as a perpetual revolution. The title given to the mural and the text panel that accompany the work reinforce this positioning. “From Porfirianism to the Revolution” encourages visitors to experience the mural sequentially, beginning with the east wall (to the visitor’s right as she enters the gallery), then proceeding across the north wall and finishing at the far end of the gallery with the line of dead soldiers. In this way, the museum tries to suture Siqueiros’s mural into the progressive liberal narrative of its historical exhibitions. However, it is incredibly jarring to try to experience the mural in this way, as one is constantly moving against the lines of visual force in the composition. Moreover, as if to ensure that Siqueiros’s mural would not be the final word on the revolution, museum administrators commissioned O’Gorman to execute a second cycle on this theme the year after Siqueiros completed his. Like Solares’s unfinished mural in the grand staircase, O’Gorman’s mural, Effective Vote—No Re-­election (1960–61), emphasizes Francisco I. Madero’s liberal reforms as the catalyst for the revolution (figure 34). O’Gorman frames his fresco with a large red banner proclaiming the basic tenets of the Plan de San Luis Potosí (from which the mural’s title is taken). He conflates two signal moments in Madero’s career: his triumphal entrance into Mexico City in 1910 as the first democratically elected president since 1884 and his journey from Chapultepec Castle to the National Palace in 1913 just prior to the coup that led to his death. As in his Independence mural, his-

torical actors and sites are comingled with generalized representations of soldiers, the exploited poor, and allegorical figures. Directly across from this image, the artist has executed two frescos portraying the corruption of Díaz’s regime. The first of these two panels, collectively entitled Porfirian Feudalism (1967–), depicts Díaz’s positivist advisors, while the second presents a pulquería (a bar that serves an indigenous liquor made from the maguey plant) as an instrument of working-­class control and corruption at the hands of the landed aristocracy (figure 35). A series of portraits painted in the narrow spaces between the windows along the gallery wall was to depict the generals of the revolutionary factions, but only images of Villa and Felipe Ángeles were completed before O’Gorman’s suicide in 1982. O’Gorman’s murals explore the same historical episode that Siqueiros treats. Whereas Siqueiros crafts this process as a dialectic between popular struggle and authoritarian rule, O’Gorman presents the relationship as a simple opposition between good and bad leaders. Siqueiros foregrounds the anonymous workers and peasants martyred by the struggle. O’Gorman emphasizes heroic individuals. Both artists make reference to Christian sacrifice to beatify the revolution. However, for Siqueiros, it is a worker who is crucified, while O’Gorman sanctifies Madero. These iconographic differences are further enhanced by compositional variances. Siqueiros used polyangular perspective to activate the viewer, effectively making her the physical and conceptual agent of the revolutionary dialectic. O’Gorman immobilizes the viewer between two veristic scenes that recede into illusionistic landscapes. Both of his murals reveal Rivera’s influence in their meticulous detail, trompe l’oeil texts, sloganeering banners, and allegorical treatment of the realist idiom. O’Gorman does not implicate the viewing subject in the action. We are posiA Patriotic Sanctuary  123

34 Juan O’Gorman, Effective Vote—No Re-­election, 1960–61

tioned at a historical remove from these events, contemplating windows onto another time. As the inheritors of Madero’s liberal sacrifice, we stand in the present perfect of a realized historical process. In the end, the National History Museum represents the last venue in the battle that began in 1933–34 when Siqueiros and Rivera staged their dispute at the Palace of Fine Arts. By the 1960s, the dangers Siqueiros noted in Rivera’s national populism had come to fruition as a legion of artists without his political sensibility deployed his iconography in increasingly uncritical ways. The murals by O’Gorman and Camarena at the Na124   A Patriotic Sanctuary

tional History Museum make this evident. While aesthetically compelling, in their unapologetic efforts to uphold and enhance the museum’s bastardized liberalism, they “echo the historical thrust of the official ideology of the Mexican Revolution,”130 arguing, in the words of Néstor García Canclini, that “the state gives expression to popular values, whether revolutionary or national, and arbitrates in their interests.”131 Camarena, even more than O’Gorman, would embrace his role as a state artist by agreeing to be the chief illustrator for subsequent editions of the government’s free textbooks. His overtly patriotic allegories are

pure social realist kitsch, every bit as familiar to generations of Mexicans as the campy calendar art of Jesús Helguera or the passionate escapades of María Félix.132 As the laboratory of didactic exhibition, the National History Museum was indeed the site of coincidence and opportunism between artists and their federal patrons. Here, the divergent interests of the government and muralists converged around an attempt to claim the legacy of the revolution for posterity. Yet as the foregoing discussion indicates, the story of how and why murals were integrated into museum practice at this in-

stitution is rife with historical contingencies and unintended consequences. Murals were initially commissioned to enhance impoverished displays and to lend some narrative coherence to the permanent exhibition. As a consequence, museum practitioners and the artists themselves endeavored to craft murals as technologies of truth rather than partisan tracts or devices for radical political change. Siqueiros agitated against this reconstruction of the mural device as didactic support by attempting to realign the truth in painting with his dialectical realism. Even as Siqueiros endeavored to interrupt the

35 Juan O’Gorman, The March of Loyalty, detail of Porfirian Feudalism, 1967–

A Patriotic Sanctuary  125

patriotic ideology of didactic exhibitions, his failure to do so demonstrated to museum practitioners precisely what Paz points out: that “beyond this or that ideological inclination, [mural art] expressed the genius of our people and its revolution.”133 The Siqueiros episode helped museographers to see that murals could accrue a symbolic value—as Mexican culture—regardless of whether or not they corresponded in any real way to the exhibitions around them. Commenting on the significance of murals to Mexican museography, Felipe Lacouture y Fornelli, director of the museum from 1977 to 1982, remarked that even though the murals were initially commissioned as explanatory addenda to the museum’s exhibitions, ultimately they surpassed their supporting role. In praise of the mural art, he states: “Before it is art, muralism is a message, an historico-­politico-­social and public message, that succeeds as art, and is a work of art, but art in addition. Yet with the enormous force of the art of great masters, murals exceed the presentation of objects with such strong visual form, that ultimately they inspire respect not as didactic objects alone but rather as primordial works of art in the museum.”134 What Lacouture y Fornelli describes here is official culture. His claim that murals are first and foremost appreciated as “works of art in the museum” reveals that by the 1960s, both O’Gorman’s and Siqueiros’s hopes for the mural device had lost sway. Ultimately murals would be neither techniques of empirical truth nor radical inducements to action. However, without the experiments in didactic museology undertaken at the National History

126   A Patriotic Sanctuary

Museum, it is uncertain that murals would have become so central to museum practice in Mexico. Siqueiros’s challenges to institutional culture, while unsuccessful, would not be tolerated again in a state-­funded project. In the marquee project of the 1960s, the new National Anthropology Museum, museographers took their cue instead from Rufino Tamayo and turned to public art to demonstrate the glorious modern heritage of the nation’s pre-­Columbian origins. At this museum the didactic function of murals as integral components of displays is superseded by their status as impressive works of modern art. Inviting artists from many aesthetic persuasions to participate, museographers gave these artists absolute freedom, knowing that their murals would be read through the exhibitions (as Siqueiros’s mural is at the National History Museum). Moreover, many involved were from the generation of artists who followed Tamayo’s example and rebelled against the cactus curtain by advocating an existential and politically nihilistic art that eschewed “reality” altogether. They, in concert with the politically eviscerated second generation of social realists, were the perfect state artists for this, the crown jewel of Mexico’s postrevolutionary culture project. Moreover, at the National Anthropology Museum, the sons of Cuauhtémoc would finally return to the womb of indigenous tradition and break out of the solitude of the pathological nationalism displayed so heroically at the National History Museum. Or would they? It is to this story we now turn.

3

The Womb of the Patria

The glorification of México-­Tenochtitlán in the Museum of Anthropology is an exaltation of the image of the Aztec pyramid, now guaranteed, so to speak, by science. The regime sees itself, transfigured, in the world of the Aztecs. And in contemplating itself it affirms itself. . . . Therefore a critique of Tlatelolco . . . includes the Museum of Anthropology.  Octavio Paz On 17 September 1964, President Adolfo López Mateos inaugurated the new National Anthropology Museum before an international audience amassed under the cantilevered canopy of its large interior patio (figure 36). On that occasion, the “great orator” president declared: “The Mexican people raise this monument in honor of the admirable cultures that flourished during the pre-­Columbian era in regions that are today territories of the republic. Before the testimonies of those cultures, the Mexico of today pays homage to indigenous Mexico, in whose example it recognizes essential characteristics of its national originality.”1 As López Mateos’s sexenio project, the museum was opened in time to mark the end of his administration and to coincide with the patriotic fiestas celebrating Mexican independence. Moreover, the museum’s spectacular presentation of Mesoamerican cultures was intended to demonstrate to Mexicans and the world alike not only that Mexico’s cultural heritage was as deep and impressive as the Greek and Roman antiquity that Europeans claimed, but also that its level of civilization and artistic accomplishment had determined the contemporary achievements of the

postrevolutionary nation-­state. Over and over again, audiences were instructed to see the nation’s “originality” and its modern destiny foretold in the “admirable cultures that flourished during the pre-­Columbian era.” However, in asserting Mexico’s Mesoamerican antiquity as a determinant of the nation’s modernity, administrators, politicians, and intellectuals faced the perennial problem of Western assumptions about the barbarity of ancient indigenous cultures and, in particular, the stigma of ritual sacrifice. Moreover, the defeat of these civilizations by the Spanish needed to be acknowledged and rationalized in order to celebrate the nation’s non-­Western origins. Thus, the centuries-­ long problem of reconciling the foundation of a culturally and ethnically hybrid republic with the traumas and legacies of conquest and colonization needed to be resolved once and for all. This was particularly the case given López Mateos’s ambitions to announce Mexico’s arrival as a developed nation-­state with the 1968 Olympics. As Eric Zolov has argued, by hosting the Olympic games, Mexican officials hoped to turn the “land of mañana” into the “land of tomorrow.”2

36 Exterior view of the National Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

The first and most important salvo in a renewed federal campaign to promote culture as part of the Mexican Miracle, the new National Anthropology Museum was conceived and celebrated as the nation’s response to doubts—both domestic and foreign—about Mexico’s capacity to achieve first-­world status despite a history of underdevelopment and social antagonism. At its inauguration, cultural experts from throughout Europe and North and Latin America hailed the museum as the most advanced of its kind.3 “It is the best museum in the world,” the architect Philip Johnson declared in Time.4 Members of the U.S. State Department, unesco, the Organization of American States, and the Canadian Council for the Arts concurred, lauding the Mexican government for its efforts to educate the Mexican public and the world about its rich cultural heritage. Museum practitioners from Harvard, the University of Cambridge, the Smith128   The Womb of the Patria

sonian Institution, the Musée de l’Homme, and the Rijksmuseum, to name only a few, cited the museum as an example to follow, commending its innovative displays and masterful integration of architecture, art, and anthropology. “In museography,” exclaimed Sir Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery in London, “Mexico is now ahead of the United States perhaps by a generation, of the United Kingdom perhaps by a ­century.”5 Arguably the crown jewel of postrevolutionary museology, the new National Anthropology Museum represents the culmination of the processes chronicled thus far. The ideological thrust of its permanent exhibition embodies the official indigenismo of postrevolutionary cultural mestizaje. Its state-­of-­the-­art displays, especially their integration of modern art, perfected the experiments in didactic museology pioneered at the National History Museum. And like the cultivation of a “Mexican universal” within the artistic na-

tionalism promoted at the Palace of Fine Arts, the “deep Mexico” presented at the National Anthropology Museum was calibrated to demonstrate Mexico’s rightful place within a cosmopolitan cultural heritage, and thus its claim on modernity. The works of monumental modern art commissioned for the museum were essential for asserting the formal and spiritual link between Mexico’s Mesoamerican past and its cosmopolitan modernity. While the story of national becoming built into the museum’s architecture and displays was rooted in the narrative didacticism of Diego Rivera’s mural style, the use of the murals and mural-­scaled objects as visual technologies within this museum was more ornamental than pedagogical and thus reflected the triumph of Rufino Tamayo’s challenge to the Mexican school. Twenty-­three artists representing every tendency in postrevolutionary art are represented in the museum’s twenty-­five galleries. However, none engages the architecture or museographic space the way David Alfaro Siqueiros had at the National History Museum. The artists’ role was to represent the modern legacy of pre-­Columbian cultural accomplishment. Rather than seek to politicize aesthetics, the artists working at the National Anthropology Museum engaged in the aesthetic sublimation of politics that Tamayo advocated. Thus the decades-­long struggle to enact muralism’s revolutionary mandate to be a weapon for social change gave way, finally, to the seductive power of official culture. Unlike discussions in previous chapters, in this story, mural artists are not the featured protagonists. While their monumental works are essential components of the exhibitions on site, the artists did not determine or challenge the development of museology at the National Anthropology Museum. Mexican museum science had already been perfected by 1964, and mural art had already been reconstituted from a political device

to a monumental fine art. But this does not mean that the artists working at the National Anthropology Museum shared their patron’s vision tout court. Rather, we see great aesthetic and ideological variation among the murals on site. Thus the National Anthropology Museum, more than the previous case studies, allows us to analyze what happened when mural art was decoupled from institutional critique. How, specifically, did the shift from an aesthetic rooted in engaged politics to one committed to modern mythmaking help to establish a “structural relationship between the nature of culture and the peculiarities of the state”?6 If we recall Roger Bartra’s argument that official culture is first and foremost an effect of the “creation of an ensemble of myths about Mexican identity,” the National Anthropology Museum would seem to be an exemplary site, if not the site, for an exploration of mural artists’ role in national myth­ making.7 The National Anthropology Museum symbolized the triumph of the postrevolutionary state’s culture project and Mexican museology in particular. As the institution charged with demonstrating and celebrating the indigenous origins of Mexican identity, this museum represents the most sophisticated attempt on the part of the postrevolutionary state to, in the words of Paz, “creat[e] a redemption myth which is also a fertility myth, a creation myth.”8 Conceived thus, the National Anthropology Museum is a mechanism through which the modern mestizo can commune with his Indian mother, the desired “return” within the “dialectic of solitude” to the “womb” of the patria. And yet as Paz’s remarks in the epigraph reveal, in the wake of the state massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco, the museum would come to be viewed as the preeminent sign of Mexico’s political and cultural atavism. In Postdata, his searing indictment of the massacre, Paz implicates the museum, and in parThe Womb of the Patria  129

ticular its glorification of the Aztec Empire, in the authoritarianism of Mexican culture and statecraft. In the museum, he writes, “anthropology and history have been made to serve an idea about Mexico’s history, and that idea is the foundation, the buried and immovable base, that sustains our conceptions of the state, of political power, and of social order.”9 Referring to this conception as the “apotheosis-­apocalypse of México-­Tenochtitlán,” he concludes that any “political, social, and moral” critique of state violence must include a critique of the Museum of Anthropology.10 But even as Paz turned a deconstructive eye on postrevolutionary museum science, he failed to note the role played by the very artists he promoted in the museum’s exhibitions. He had made his name as a critic of the Mexican school of painting; however, he was ultimately unwilling to see that his advocacy of a “vision[ary]” and “exploratory” rather than politically engaged public art enabled rather than impeded the power politics of a patriarchal and paternal state.11 In what follows, I reconstitute the collective euphoria that accompanied the creation of the National Anthropology Museum and contextualize its eventual reappraisal as a work of violent statecraft within the political culture of the 1960s. To do so, I have divided the chapter into three parts. In the first part I detail the governmental aspirations for the museum evident in its structure, the ritual of its exhibitions, and the political rhetoric that accompanied its inauguration. The second part focuses on the diverse murals executed within the museum in order to survey the myriad aesthetic and ideological strategies artists devised to characterize Mexico’s indigenous past and its relation to the present. The third chronicles the crisis of state authority and the emergence of a critical discourse about museum practice that took the National Anthropology Museum as its primary object. By exploring how and why this in130   The Womb of the Patria

stitution, above all others, was criticized, we can better appreciate not only the failures of the state’s technocratic attempts to manage the nation’s stigmatized and repudiated Indian mother but also the extent to which critiques leveled by artists and intellectuals actually coincided with the state project they sought to expose.

The Museum Mesoamerica, Museopatria, and the National Anthropology Museum The National Anthropology Museum has existed in some form since the late colonial period, when in 1790 the first Natural History Museum was established to commemorate King Charles IV’s ascent to the Spanish throne.12 Reflecting the “enlightened” ideals of the Bourbon monarchy, the holdings at the Natural History Museum included plant, mineral, and animal specimens in addition to historical artifacts and newly discovered stone monoliths recovered from the ritual precinct of Tenochtitlán buried beneath the Spanish Zócalo.13 Rather than ordering the destruction of these pagan objects, the New Spanish viceroy, the Count of Revillagigedo, ordered that they be preserved at the museum for study by learned men.14 These monoliths—the Coatlicue, the so-­called calendar stone, and Stone of Tizoc—attracted naturalists like Baron Alexander Von Humboldt and showmen like William Bullock as Mesoamerican objects became highly coveted possessions in an emergent Western “exhibitionary complex.”15 Throughout the nineteenth century, European fascination with pre-­Columbian culture fueled the collecting and pillaging of Mexican antiquities as well as the construction of a racist ethnographic science that upheld European claims to social and cultural superiority. While the Spanish crown claimed these objects as part of their do-

main, the colonial regime viewed them with a nervous ambivalence despite a nascent Creole desire to lay claim to the Indian past. Thus, regardless of European esteem for these objects, the calendar stone was initially installed along the foundation of the Metropolitan Cathedral as visual evidence of New Spain’s dominance over her pagan past rather than highlighted within an antiquities gallery.16 The Coatlicue was reburied after her excavation and only disinterred at Humboldt’s request and then relegated to storage.17 For the colonial regime, Aztec ruins served the political agenda of challenging Peninsular authority; however, plaster casts of Greek and Roman antiquities were preferred in the display of New Spanish cultural acumen. Nonetheless, these objects remained in Mexico. In time and through the museum, they became key reference points in the articulation of a national cultural identity capable of rivaling ancient Greece or Rome and thereby countering the exclusive claims of European discourses on civilization. In this way, Aztec ruins, in particular, were constituted as a national culture with universal resonance. Luís Gerardo Morales Moreno argues that the political crisis of Mexican independence occasioned this new attitude toward pre-­Columbian ruins as Creole patriots endeavored to root their claims to a sovereign patria in Aztec soil.18 From this point forward, Indian antiquities, previously viewed as idols or curiosities, would be venerated as the material evidence of Mexico’s grandeza (its past grandeur), and the imperial Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, as the womb of its national destiny. After independence, the creation of the new National Museum was officially decreed in 1825; however, it would take another forty years before it was actualized. In 1867, the museum was situated in downtown Mexico City in the former mint (the Casa de Moneda), and in 1887 a gallery of Mesoamerican sculpture was finally opened to the pub-

lic. Throughout the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the museum played an integral role in the development of national history, scientific positivism, and Mexico’s participation in international exhibitions and world’s fairs.19 While an important center for research, the museum did not yet function as a truly public institution. Instead it served the intellectual elite struggling to define lo ­mexicano. In 1909 the collections were parsed along the nature-­culture divide and allocated to two different museums—the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Archeology, History, and Ethnography—timed to open as part of the elaborate centennial celebrations of 1910. With the vanquished pre-­conquest past now mingling with historical displays dedicated to the heroes of independence, the new National Museum effectively married a pro-­mestizo liberal narrative of Mexican history with Creole indigenismo, forging what Morales Moreno calls a “museopatria” that functioned as a propagandistic stage for Porfirian statecraft.20 With the revolution, the first official historians, anthropologists, archeologists, and museographers generated by the museum turned their vocation toward the construction of a public. “In leading the search for a patriotic identity,” writes Morales Moreno, these elites “also converted a dead area into something full of meaning for the living . . . filled with vitality through the magic of museography.”21 Morales Moreno’s recourse to metaphors of death, magic, and reanimation when characterizing Mexican museology and its relationship to the Aztec past is particularly cogent. Drawn from the ideological claims of the museum’s exhibitionary logic, the trope of Mesoamerica’s death and its patriotic reanimation speaks to the violence implicit in Mexico’s national culture project as well as to the naturalization of political brutality within the rhetorics of museum display. The Womb of the Patria  131

The growing importance of the museum’s Mesoamerican holdings was signaled in 1910, when Justo Sierra, a positivist historian and minister of education during the Díaz regime, proposed that the National Museum be relocated and housed within a new modern building that would better facilitate the museum’s public and patriotic mission. Sierra launched this proposal at the Twelfth International Congress of Americanists held in Mexico City, announcing boldly, “I have faith that the next time the Congress meets in Mexico, it will celebrate its sessions in a splendid edifice designated by the federal government to the guardianship of our archeologic collections and our relics.” “The plans are ready,” he concluded, “and the resources forthcoming.”22 Sierra’s faith in the progress and bountiful resources of the Porfiriato was, of course, challenged by the outbreak of the revolution. In the aftermath of the civil war, the museum remained in the Casa de Moneda for another forty years in what was viewed by all as an outmoded and musty space. In the 1940s, the historical collections were relocated to the National History Museum in Chapultepec Castle, leaving only the archeological and ethnographic materials in the National Museum. Sierra’s proposal was resurrected in 1962 at the Thirty-­Fifth International Congress of Americanists, once again celebrated in Mexico City, when the minister of education, Jaime Torres Bodet, announced an ambitious campaign for the renewal and enhancement of Mexico’s museum landscape. As part of President López Mateos’s sweeping educational reforms, Torres Bodet was charged with creating a more comprehensive and rational system of public museums that would include not only a new building for the National Anthropology Museum but also a museum dedicated to the history of Mexico City (the Museo de la Ciudad de México), one for the border city Juárez (the Museo de la Ciudad Juárez), a new in132   The Womb of the Patria

stallation of colonial arts at a former Jesuit monastery in Tepotzotlán (the Museo Nacional del Virreinato), a Modern Art Museum (the Museo de Arte Moderno), and an annex to the National History Museum comprised of historical dioramas for children (the Galería Historia, or Caracol). It was determined that the new National Anthropology Museum should be relocated to Chapultepec Park in order to better facilitate its public mission. And Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, an architect and close friend to the president, was secured to head up the projects at this museum as well as the museum in Juárez, the Modern Art Museum, and the Caracol (see p. 133).23 López Mateos significantly stepped up the federal government’s role in cultural patronage as part of his political and economic populism. In echoing the cultural enthusiasm and educational reforms of the 1920s, he sought to invoke and complete Vasconcelos’s utopian national culture project.24 More than any previous president, López Mateos understood the power of visual spectacle for public persuasion. The chief architect, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, recollected that the mandate he received from the president was “that on leaving the museum, the Mexican feels proud to be Mexican,” and that “it be so attractive that people say, ‘Did you go to the museum yet?’ the same way they say, ‘Did you go to the theater yet?’ or ‘Did you go to the cinema yet?’”25 López Mateos’s famed talent for oratory, striking good looks, and skill as a diplomat made him the perfect embodiment of the Mexican Miracle. And despite his problems with labor and the Left, his enthusiastic faith in the nation’s destiny as a model of development made him enormously popular at home and abroad. In particular, his successful management of Mexico’s delicate foreign policy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs won the support and admiration of Western Europe’s socialist regimes, the Kennedy

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administration, and the emergent countries of the so-­called third world.26 No friend of communism, López Mateos had worked consistently to quash leftist groups in Mexico, and yet he refused to condemn the Cuban Revolution. Invoking Mexico’s policy of non-­intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, he insisted on the country’s political independence and non-­alignment in the cold war standoff between the United States and the USSR. However, he maintained the postwar state’s commitment to modernization and capitalist development.27 Thus in international arenas, he consistently presented Mexico as an arbiter of peace, crafting the country’s supposed ethnic and class harmony as exemplary of its alternative modernity. The symbolic politics of López Mateos’s re­gime culminated in the Cultural Olympiad staged in the year leading up to the 1968 games. As Zolov chronicles, the discursive coordinates of the Cultural Olympiad heralded Mexico’s role as

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a peacemaker in international affairs and its cultural cosmopolitanism.28 Emphasizing at once the nation’s modern values and its exotic folkloric traditions, the yearlong programming sought to convince the world that a “developing nation” not only could handle the logistical challenges of the Olympic games but, moreover, was ready to take its place among the nations of the first world.29 Planned and executed by Ramírez Vázquez, the Cultural Olympiad merely expanded upon the ideological project he had elaborated and perfected as chief architect of the National Anthropology Museum.

Mexicanizing the Indian: The Museum as (Masculine) Mestizo Ritual Planning, Designing, and Building the Museum %%With

Torres Bodet’s announcement of López Mateos’s museum-­building campaign, plans for The Womb of the Patria  133

the new National Anthropology Museum went into effect immediately. A team of museologists and anthropologists was convened in 1961 to “obtain the most precise evaluation possible from the didactic point of view” in order to perfect the installations of the new museum.30 The subsequent planning document testifies to museographers’ faith in the technocratic management of the public. In the first stage, the planning team studied public opinion of the old National Anthropology Museum (the former installation at the Casa de Moneda). The second stage involved the “direct observation” of visitors to the old museum’s galleries in order to ascertain what aspects of the exhibitions garnered the greatest interest.31 The third stage was concerned with evaluating public preferences in terms of colors, lighting, food, and the like. And the fourth stage involved visitor surveys of mock-­up exhibitions in order to determine their pedagogic value as well as to gauge the public’s enjoyment of modern display techniques. More than any other museum thus far discussed, the new National Anthropology Museum was conceived, from the outset, as a scientific instrument of social governance and emotional ­manipulation. As part of this study, Ramírez Vázquez sent envoys to fifty-­eight museums worldwide to garner inspiration and to learn from any self-­evident problems in modern museology.32 At the Louvre his advisors discovered the difficulty presented by a building of enormous scale as well as the need to orchestrate visitor flows. However, the wild popularity of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), on permanent view at the Louvre, reinforced the importance of displaying outstanding objects in order to attract large audiences. In another instance, Ramírez Vázquez was inspired by Paul Valéry’s quote proclaiming the grand mission of Paris’s Musée de l’Homme emblazoned on the exterior of the museum. He resolved to use inscriptions by illustrious Mexicans at the entrance and throughout his museum as well.33 134   The Womb of the Patria

During the planning and building stages, museographers made seventy trips into the interior of the country in search of objects to round out the museum’s collections. Ramírez Vázquez claims that the museum acquired approximately 3,500 archeological objects, while the ethnographic collections were enhanced by 95 percent.34 These forays into rural Mexico were hailed as advances in scientific knowledge about Mexico’s ancient and living indigenous heritage. To wit, the movement of the 179-­ton Tlaloc monolith by flatbed truck to the Federal District was covered with enthusiasm by the press. Official chroniclers of the museum’s construction routinely note not only the technical difficulties of moving such a heavy object but also the architectural innovations undertaken at the museum to facilitate the installation and display of such a monumental patrimony. Today this period of collecting is viewed as the pillaging of regional culture for the purposes of “museologic centralism.”35 However, at the time, it was celebrated as a government-­sponsored salvage anthropology through which Mexico’s Indian past could be properly conserved and instrumentalized as part of the state’s modernizing national culture project. As Ramírez Vázquez proudly reiterated at the museum’s inauguration, the National Anthropology Museum represented the conversion of “museums into a necessary and permanent lesson for the people: to make them educational and a spectacle that shows the past not in order to copy it but rather in order to learn from it and to prepare the ground for our future in the inspiration that it can offer us.”36 The building and permanent installation were completed in a record nineteen months.37 In order to meet the 17 September 1964 deadline, Ramírez Vázquez organized approximately five thousand people—from anthropologists and museographers to carpenters, glassworkers, and electricians, and from advanced architectural students to some of Mexico’s most esteemed modern art-

37 View of interior patio and cantilevered canopy of National Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

ists—into twenty-­five teams.38 These teams were each assigned one of the galleries in the permanent installation, and together they shaped the exhibition space, selected exemplary works from the archive, designed and built display cases, selected wall colors, drafted labels, and solved exhibitionary problems particular to the holdings or materials for each culture group. Despite this enormous collective effort, the museum’s overall design was formulated and directed by Ramírez Vázquez. An advocate of modernist architecture, Ramírez Vázquez rooted his plan in the international precepts of functionalism but modified it with regional traditions deriving from pre-­Columbian urban planning and design. He distributed the galleries around a large open-­ air patio and devised an enormous cantilevered canopy—an engineering marvel—to provide cover during the rainy season. Thus the National Anthropology Museum carried on, but in per-

fected form, the efforts at the cu to integrate Mexican attributes into international-­style architectural precepts. For example, the patio was inspired by the plazas found in Mesoamerican cities such as Teotihuacán and Monte Albán, while interior decorative elements such as the abstract wooden curtains (celosías) that house the museum’s vestibules and line its passageways drew from various ancient precedents such as the friezes that run along Mayan pyramids (figure 37).39 Likewise, the building nodded to certain colonial influences as well. The use of colored marble and the creation of a large processional space were inspired by the myriad Catholic churches in Mexico.40 The ideological claims embedded in the museum’s built structure are best exemplified in the cast bronze fountain that serves as the central support for the cantilevered canopy (figures 38 and 39). Designed and manufactured by the artist José Chávez Morado and his brother Tomás, the The Womb of the Patria  135

38 Support

column by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, eastern orientation, National Anthropology Museum

39 Support column by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, western orientation, National Anthropology Museum

fountain is fashioned into a column and covered in an elaborate symbolic relief that corresponds with the four cardinal points. The eastern orientation is devoted to “the theme of integration.”41 Along the base, an eagle and jaguar are separated by the “sword of the conquest” and superimposed on a rising sun.42 Along the shaft, the sword splits the roots of a ceiba—“a Mayan symbol for the foundation of a people”—into two branches representing indigenous and European culture.43 A second eagle mounts the capital representing the modern nation-­state. The western orientation presents Mexico’s aspirations in the world through images of a striving man whose open arms proffer an olive branch and dove. Located below a symbol of nuclear fusion and above a setting sun, he represents Mexico’s attempts to present itself as a peaceful alternative to the world’s two nuclear powers. The north and south orientations present three weapons that “wound the tree,” here representing Mexico.44 These refer to the wars for independence and reform, and the revolution of 1910. Chávez Morado’s iconography recalls Diego Rivera’s use of the rising and setting sun in his National Palace murals. However, Rivera painted a setting sun in the northern lunette of his staircase fresco to represent the immanent fall of Tenochtitlán, and a rising sun in the southern lunette to augur the communist reawakening of postrevolutionary Mexico.45 Chávez Morado reverses this symbolism. On his column, the sun rises with the conquest and sets as a consequence of global peace in the nuclear age. Thus, despite his stylistic debt to Rivera, Chávez Morado inverted his message. At the National Anthropology Museum the dialectic of history is not motivated by the socialist struggle to reconstitute the Aztecs’ resistance against the Spanish invaders in proletarian revolution. Rather, the dialectic of history originates in the technological revolution instantiated in the conquest and closes when this violence is 138   The Womb of the Patria

subsumed by the progressive (and humanist) struggle for the peaceful application of scientific knowledge. As this summary of Chávez Morado’s iconographic program suggests, the symbolic fountain marking the entrance to the permanent installation at the National Anthropology Museum reflects the same liberal vision of national history and character espoused by Juan O’Gorman in his library mosaic History of Mexico at the cu (see figures 29 and 30). Steeped in the well-­developed iconography of postrevolutionary mestizaje, this fountain/structural support was not merely a feat of modern engineering; it was also an assertion, in the words of Ramírez Vázquez, of the “universality of Mexican culture.”46 For like the governmental management of the population via a national culture program more broadly, the museum was imagined as a highly scientific, rational, and above all modern technique for fashioning patriotic citizens. Orchestrating the Museum Ritual %%As

many scholars have noted, the National Anthropology Museum was conceived as a ritual space. This state-­of-­the-­art building was organized architecturally to glorify the Aztec Empire and to assert the Mexicas, out of all the Mesoamerican populations, as the true ancestors of modern Mexicans.47 The entire building has thus been orchestrated as a secular cathedral where modern Mexicans go to worship at the altar of pre-­ Columbian Mexico. This patriotic ritual is a mainstay of Mexican education and family leisure. It is a rite of citizenship to visit the National Anthropology Museum, and it is rare to meet a Mexican who has not been to this museum at least once, either with a school group or on a family vacation. Ramírez Vázquez and his team designed the visitor’s approach to the building and the flow of bodies through space, as well as the galleries

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themselves, to maximum effect. The museum is announced to traffic along the Avenida Reforma by the enormous Tlaloc monolith, located at the park’s entrance. Upon one’s entrance to the park, the museum seems to rise, as if by magic, the closer one gets to it. From the museum’s plaza, its facade appears as a horizontal rectangle anchored on the left and right by two brutalist blocks. Comprised of alternating rectangles of rusticated and smoothed white marble from Santó Tomás in Puebla, the entrance is emblazoned with a relief carving of the Mexican toponym. Thus the facade echoes the tripartite form of the Mexican flag, reiterating, in a calcified form, the giant cloth flag that flutters in front of it. The cantilevered struts that support the canopy are centered on the toponym, suggesting a pyramid. The visitor enters a grand lobby with a theater, space for temporary exhibitions, and gift stores. Here, through a wall of windows, she can see the museum’s courtyard, which evokes the Nunnery Quadrangle (Cuadrángulo de las

Library

Floor plan for the first-­floor galleries at the National Anthropology Museum

Monjas) in Uxmal. Thus the sequenced passage from the park to the lobby to the museum enacts a kind of shedding of the modern world as the visitor moves from a high modernist exterior through a liminal space or threshold and then into an ancient Mayan court. The permanent exhibition is divided into twenty-­five galleries that run along three sides of the long rectangular patio (map 3). The galleries are distributed across two levels, with Mexico’s impressive archeological heritage displayed to spectacular effect on the ground floor, and the somewhat less impressive displays of the nation’s contemporary indigenous peoples allocated to the second story. The collections are organized into culture groups and presented in sequential exhibits that begin in galleries at the visitor’s right with pre-­classic cultures from central Mexico, then Teotihuacán and the Toltecs. The gallery at the apex of the courtyard is dedicated to the Aztecs. The galleries that run along the left proceed from Oaxacan cultures to the Gulf Coast and The Womb of the Patria  139

Maya and culminate with the culture groups from northern and western Mexico. While patrons are free to enter any gallery from the central patio, there is a clearly marked introductory hall that explains the museum’s mission and the science of anthropology. This gallery roots the museum’s patriotic displays and civilizational claims in the international authority of comparative anthropology. In his statement about the “origins, aims and achievements” of this museum, Ignacio Bernal, director of inah during the period of the museum’s construction and then director of the museum throughout the 1960s, makes explicit the significance of the science of anthropology to the Mexican nation. He writes: “Those who planned the new National Museum of Anthropology decided to include an initiatory hall that would justify the Museum’s name and at the same time present a universal framework into which the Mexican cultures could be fitted in space and time, as well as allowing visitors to compare their cultural contributions with those of other peoples.”48 This initiatory hall opens with a mural by Jorge González Camarena depicting Mestizaje (1964) and proceeds to explain the science of anthropology through didactic presentations of its physical, linguistic, archeological, and ethnographic methods. Working within his well-­defined illustrational style, Camarena depicts highly idealized female figures with Asian, Indian, African, and Caucasian physiognomies and symbolic attributes metamorphosing into a single racially amalgamated central figure. Camarena’s iconography radiates laterally from this central female allegory representing the “cosmic race.” To her far left, a veiled Caucasian woman turns her back to the viewer, thereby suggesting a kind of modesty, and at the far right, a visibly pregnant nude African woman displays herself frontally, arguing for her more “natural” relationship to the body. These two women rep140   The Womb of the Patria

resent the extreme racial and cultural poles that make up the blended ideal of the mestizo median. While steeped in the eugenic logic of early twentieth-­century arguments about race and culture, Camarena’s mural deviates from Vasconcelos’s prescriptions in The Cosmic Race. In the latter’s conception, the new mestizo was, in the final analysis, a Hispanicized figure that would “redeem” the blood of the “lower breeds” through selective interbreeding.49 At its base, the “cosmic race” that Vasconcelos envisioned was an idealized mixture of Spanish and Indian blood and culture. Camarena’s mural differs from Vasconcelos’s treatise in a number of subtle ways; however, most significantly, it diverges from Vasconcelos’s racist attitude toward the so-­called African race. The author devotes scant attention to this “race,” only mentioning it in order to disparage it and argue, in essence, that it had nothing to contribute to his mestizo ideal. In Camarena’s iteration the mestizo is a black-­white, rather than Spanish-­Indian, ­hybrid. Camarena’s mural reinforces the racial logic that the “white” and “black” races represent absolute opposites on the spectrum of race and culture. However, his mural does endorse the cultural relativism espoused in comparative anthropology by situating these racial poles on the same plane rather than organizing them in a hierarchical chart as nineteenth-­century evolutionary scientists had. Thus his mural supports the claims of the introductory gallery, wherein museologists endeavored to locate Mexico within a culturally relative and racially egalitarian anthropological science. Presenting a progressive narrative that moves from prehistoric animal and plant life to the emergence of humans, the display culminates with “civilization” and the concept of horizontal cultures. As the origin of the museologic journey, it prepares the viewer to understand the objects in subsequent galleries as both national in content and universal in significance. Likewise, it presents

Mexican anthropology as up to date, and thus free of the racial biases of the past. Via Camarena’s mural, the introductory hall recruits conventional allegory to suggest that cultures are rooted in the biological reproduction of the female body. Women are the physical and symbolic matrix of racial inheritance and thus cultures and nations. However, this biological origin is immediately sublimated by the rational science of comparative anthropology. Woman’s role in the processes of culture is constituted as part of the “natural” world that is reshaped and given meaning through the cultural practices that constitute civilizations. The cultures associated with each allegory are represented through a frieze of stone artifacts superimposed along the lower register of the image. By representing civilization through ruins, Camarena participates in a common colonial trope wherein women and “primitive” cultures are equated and constituted as anachronistic vestiges existing in a permanent “anterior time” in the modern world.50 Through their mutual association with the primitive, women are stripped of historical agency while cultural “others” are deprived of contemporaneity. While the introductory hall does not explicitly gender civilization, it recruits the nature-­culture split that has historically marked culture and civilization as prerogatives of masculine action. This implicit gendering of civilization and the sciences that help to unpack its mysteries is naturalized through the recurrent use of the generic “man” to refer to all humans as well as the heroic narratives of male anthropologists and archeologists that are relayed in the exhibitions and especially the films that are screened throughout the museum. Thus, even as museographers attempted to assert the horizontality of race and the civilizations associated with them, they naturalized gender inequality and implicitly masculinized the modern mestizo subject.

As Tony Bennett notes, by the nineteenth century, anthropology had successfully “spatialized time” and “temporalized space,”51 by which he means that through the study of other races and cultures, anthropologists constituted whole geographic areas (e.g., Africa) as existing at an earlier stage of human development than their European contemporaries. And in a related move, they constituted the civilizational past of modern Western man as akin to so-­called primitive cultures, with certain African and Aboriginal peoples held up as primary examples. Additionally, the racial and cultural “other” of the European subject was often represented through the “naturally” inferior bodies of female specimens, the most notorious case of this being the horrific exhibitionary use of Sartje Baartman—the so-­called Hottentot Venus—in the development of ethnographic display.52 While comparative anthropology seeks to correct the value judgments associated with scientific racism and primitivism by asserting the horizontality of racialized cultures, it nonetheless adheres to a civilizational time line along which various cultures can be plotted, albeit in a purportedly value-­neutral way. Given this history, the gendering of nature and culture evident in the introductory hall at the National Anthropology Museum comes as no surprise and is consistent with ethnographic display practices throughout the Western exhibitionary complex at midcentury. While the introductory hall instructs visitors before they proceed, the final hall (no longer extant) punctuated their experience with an invitation to utilize their new knowledge by becoming proper modern citizens. Entitled “The Synthesis of Mexico,” this final gallery linked the museum’s exhibitions to the governmental initiatives of the postrevolutionary state. The final hall also reveals that the disciplinary target (object) of the museum’s exhibitions was the Indian constituted as traditional/backward and still undergoing the The Womb of the Patria  141

process of “Mexicanization,” while its subject (agent) was the mestizo, addressed as a modern (male) citizen interested in the state’s progress concerning the so-­called Indian problem. The displays demonstrated the many ways in which “old Indian cultures . . . shaped the characteristic aspects of contemporary Mexican life.”53 To wit, it emphasized architectural influences and the use of certain indigenous building materials such as tezontle stone, as well as the impact of “Indian . . . form, color, and composition” on Mexican mural art.54 However, the thrust of the didactics was on assimilation and progress. Arguing that the Mexican Revolution had revealed the “dynamic”—as opposed to static “pre-­Historic”—nature of the modern Indian, the gallery asserted that “he now utilizes modern techniques to attain a better economy, more effective care of his health and that of his children, a greater communication with others of his kind by means of modern roads, and in short an education each day more complete of himself.”55 The gallery was essentially propaganda for the governmental initiatives of the postrevolutionary state, such as the building of rural schools and public education and literacy campaigns. The formation of a new political party and legislation of labor and agrarian reform laws in particular were cited.56 In this respect it proclaimed the fulfillment of the regime’s promise to its citizenry— that it would “Mexicanize the Indian” and thereby modernize the nation—first expressed in the immediate aftermath of the revolution when General Obregón placed Vasconcelos in charge of a vast program for cultural revival and conciliation. The final display in this hall, called Modern Autochthonous Mexico, visualized, in the words of Bernal, a “synthesis of the process of social and cultural change taking place in Mexico today.”57 The synthesizing processes of modern Mexico were conveyed through a photomosaic in which 142   The Womb of the Patria

images of various ethnic groups were montaged into a progressively assimilated and modernized picture of the national populace. Bernal describes this mosaic and the museum as techniques of governance “through which the National Indigenist Institute is trying to integrate the various ethnic groups into Mexican national life.”58 If Camarena’s mural opens the exhibitions by depicting racial differentiation, with mestizaje configured as the promise of eventual biological fusion, this photomosaic was its “scientific” counterpart. Through the modern technique of documentary photography, this visual aid suggested that the social fusion promised by the postrevolutionary state was coming to fruition in the here and now through the efforts of federal institutions like the museum and the National Indigenist Institute. While museographers could have asked another artist to interpret the theme of modern autochthonous Mexico in the final display, the truth effects of photography lent this image the status of scientific fact not available to mural art despite O’Gorman’s efforts to the contrary. Functioning as bookends to the museum experience, the introductory and final halls worked to turn the viewer’s progress through the exhibitions into an evolutionary performance beginning in a glorified Indian past and working toward a progressive mestizo future: from Vasconcelos’s dream of a “cosmic race” to the reality of a modern autochthonous Mexico. This organization implies that the synthetic vision of the nation’s future is the fulfillment of a promise embodied in the culture of the nation’s past, and it configures contemporary Mexican society as an assimilated mestizo population. The Ritual Climax: México-­Tenochtitlán %%In

keeping with this patriotic narrative of national progress, the most spectacular gallery is reserved for the Valley of Mexico and located at the

40 View of the Mexica gallery, National Anthropology

Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City

apex of the patio (figure 40). Soaring two stories high, the gallery, dedicated to the great ritual precinct of Tenochtitlán, is the largest and most impressive by far. Its entrance is emblazoned with the inscription “As long as the world endures, the fame and glory of México-­Tenochtitlán will be unending,” thereby situating the visitor as awed witness to the power and glory of the nation’s supposed origins in the Aztec capital.59 Like all of the museum’s archeological displays, the Mexica exhibition employs monumental scale, theatrical lighting, and innovative spatial design to effect a psychological reaction from the viewer. Rather than a staid hall of monoliths, this gallery is more like a dynamic stage in which the visitor becomes an initiate into the drama of ritualized statecraft, both past and present. Shelly Errington has noted that unlike the galleries devoted to the other culture groups, no

ethnographic displays are dedicated to the contemporary descendents of the ancient Mexica, thereby implying that “Mexicas have as descendants all Mexicans, who are their heirs.”60 Further, in his analysis of the nationalist ritualization of culture in this museum, Néstor García Canclini suggests that by bringing together objects from all over the country to “the city that is the seat of power,” the museum heralds the triumph of the postrevolutionary state’s centralist project of “intercultural synthesis.”61 Just as the Aztecs subdued the many cultures of central Mexico, the modern state shapes a “land of many contrasts” into a unified mestizo nation. Thus the Aztecs become the symbolic and ideological anchor for the state’s modernizing project; their imperial splendor authorizes the spectacle of patrimony as handmaiden to state power. Ramírez Vázquez describes in great detail the The Womb of the Patria  143

way he designed the space in this gallery in order to control the viewer’s movement and thereby shape her subjective experience of what he called the museum’s “high altar.”62 He based the gallery on the Greek cross plan of Mesoamerican temples but orchestrated visitor movement according to the processional logic of Catholic churches, with a “central nave” that leads to the calendar stone situated in the place of the altar atop an elevated white marble dais.63 To complete this “liturgical” space, he situated the Coatlicue monolith and another of an eagle along either side of the calendar stone as though in “secondary altars.”64 “The subjective effect” of this gallery, he claims, is that visitors will “lower their voices and enter the gallery with a respectful attitude,” just as they might upon entering the sanctified interior of a cathedral.65 From his description it is clear that the Mexica gallery was conceived of as a Christian altar and a pagan sacrificial platform. The museography was calibrated, therefore, to effect both the humbled attitude of the penitent before Christ’s sacrifice as well as the awe of witnesses to Aztec sacrificial rites. However, in the place of Christ, the visitor to the National Anthropology Museum finds artifacts from the vanquished ritual precinct at Tenochtitlán. Thus, symbolically, the display Christianizes Aztec sacrifice while also secularizing religious ritual. In effect, it argues that Mesoamerica died so that modern Mexico could live. When leaving, the visitor exits where before she had entered. However, whereas upon her entrance, the sloping floor and lines of sight lead to the calendar stone and thus the magnificence of Aztec civilization, upon exiting, the visitor passes a colonial cross marking the arrival of the Spanish and thus the conquest of the Mexica or, put another way, the birth of modern Mexico in the violent death of indigenous America. The necromantic structure of the Mexica display is particularly evident in the pairing of the 144   The Womb of the Patria

Coatlicue monolith with an eagle. The former figure is associated with Aztec creation, and the latter with Aztec foundation myths. Coatlicue was the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war. She embodies the duality of pre-­Columbian cosmology as both a procreative and mortal force. She wears a necklace with the hearts and skulls of her victims; her skirt writhes with twisting snakes. A phallic serpent emerges from between her legs, representing menses, while two curling serpents emerge from her neck as symbols of the blood that flowed after her daughter Coyolxauhqui decapitated her in a fit of jealousy over the impending birth of Huitzilopochtli. As the slain mother of Huitzilopochtli, she also represents the self-­ justifying origins of the Aztec’s militant and patriarchal empire. For upon her decapitation, Huitzilopochtli emerged from her bleeding neck and avenged her death by throwing his sister from the temple and chopping her body to pieces. The eagle monolith refers to the Aztec foundation story whereby the people of Aztlán were instructed to migrate south until a prophetic sign—an eagle with a serpent in its beak alighting upon a cactus—indicated the place where they would build a great civilization. As the story goes, they settled in the Valley of Mexico, built the capital city of Tenochtitlán, and set about subduing other cultures throughout central Mexico. When Mexico won its independence, patriots not only took the new republic’s name from the ancient Mexica but also appropriated this foundational fiction by making an eagle with a serpent on a cactus the toponym for the Mexican flag. Thus, together, the Coatlicue and the eagle monoliths reinforce the themes of death, sacrifice, and rebirth while also fetishizing Aztec imperialism as the prophetic origin of the Mexican republic. And like the Aztecs, museographers accomplish this by vanquishing the ferocious mother in favor the masculinized principle of the autonomous nation-­state.

Interestingly, Huitzilopochtli is not represented in either “side chapel.” Rather, he is only inferred through the story that the Coatlicue monolith recalls. Thus, the exhibition de-­emphasizes ritual sacrifice and war, subtly equating the founding of the Aztec Empire with the emergence of modern Mexico. The violent spirit of the vanquished mother culture, however, remains in the ongoing capacity of the Coatlicue to terrify, haunt, and fascinate the modern imagination. Anathema to the dualistic structure of Judeo-­Christian doctrine, her all-­encompassing status as life giving and taking, creative and destructive, generative and vengeful, retains a certain power and reminds the contemporary viewer of the essential strangeness of Mesoamerican culture and cosmology. The admiration and horror that this monolith has generated among Western viewers is akin to that of Mesoamerican culture more broadly. And the museographers seem to have recognized both her appeal as one of the most spectacular and famous monoliths in the collection and her danger as a testament to the bloody ritual culture of the Aztecs. If México-­Tenochtitlán was to serve as the origin for a modern, peaceful mestizo nation, museographers, politicians, and technocrats alike were going to have to find a way to redeem the specter of ritual sacrifice that her story recalls and to transform the threat of a violent feminized mother culture into something more consistent with the gender norms and prescriptions of modern nationalism. Necromancy and Repro-­culture: The Silence of Cuauhtémoc %%Museology

as necromancy formed the leitmotif of Torres Bodet’s address at the museum’s inauguration. Through his words, we can better understand how state actors sought to tame the violence of Mesoamerican culture and the conquest as well as the threat of a feminized “other”

haunting the exhibitions and the masculine imaginary of the mestizo nation. Torres Bodet’s speech reads as a near-­literal transcription of Chávez Morado’s columnar relief. Like Chávez Morado, he uses a tree metaphor to establish Mexico’s dual cultural heritage, asserting the Mesoamerican roots of the blossoming mestizo nation.66 “We advance,” he proclaims, “through the affirmation of what is national, toward the integration of what is universal.”67 Having claimed the “universal” significance of national character, Torres Bodet praises the cultural achievements of pre-­Hispanic civilizations while explaining the cosmic significance of the highly stigmatized practice of ritual sacrifice. He argues: “The men of those peoples knew how to engrave the seasons in stone, to turn the elements of nature into angry or indulgent deities; they believed they could increase the strength of the Sun by their offerings and sacrifices, thus inducing him to pursue the battle of day against night, until— for the last defenders of that theocratic, imperial world—dawn represented, rather than a triumph of light over darkness, a victory, as much human as divine, of life over death.”68 With this incredible statement, he subtly recuperates human sacrifice by linking the cosmic battle between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca to the Aztecs’ valiant attempts to resist the conquest. While ostensibly a poetic description of the Mesoamerican mentalité, Torres Bodet’s argument doubles as a paradoxical justification of the conquest. In effect he argues that the Spanish defeat of the Aztec Empire was continuous with the Mexica worldview, thereby crafting this historical catastrophe into a prophetic origin story for the modern nation. Like the sun that rises with the conquest in Chávez Morado’s column, Aztec death augurs a resurrection of the “fallen eagle.” For the Mexica, the conquest represented the defeat of their gods. But in the hands of modern politicians and cultural technocrats, The Womb of the Patria  145

genocide and spiritual collapse were redeemed through the Christian trope of spiritual rebirth enacted through the magic of modern museology. This subtext becomes explicit at the end of Torres Bodet’s address when he notes that “many of the works that this museum preserves are really a splendid argument in defense of death.”69 Attributing the Mexican’s tendency toward fatalism—what Paz deems the “labyrinth of solitude”—to his ethno-­cultural inheritance, Torres Bodet nonetheless insists that in contemporary Mexico these atavistic passions were being transformed into a “fervor for life,” from “destiny as fatality” to “destiny as feat.”70 “Before Coatlicue,” he exclaims, “we bow in painful bliss, but we feel that if ‘death is in life, as the seed in the fruit,’ life and death are intermingled, for individuals and for nations, in the rivers of eternity.”71 In case his audience has any doubt about the national allegory underpinning his reference to an “individual” and “nation” stoically turning trauma into the pursuit of “freedom and virtue,” he immediately clarifies his argument: “I think of Cuauhtémoc,” he mused, whose “silence resounds still” through the treasures of the cultures vanquished by the conquest.72 Configuring the “eloquent” silence of Cuauhtémoc (i.e., his refusal to reveal the location of the Aztec treasury to Cortés, even under conditions of torture and the threat of death), as the “honorable resistance of [Mexican] being,” Torres Bodet transfigures Cuauhtémoc’s struggle into an essential aspect of national character.73 Thus the museum’s display of Mexico’s grandeza reveals to citizens and foreigners alike the country’s ability to turn its historical wounds into emblems of its spiritual fortitude. Paz argues that Cuauhtémoc is the archetypical martyred hero in the mythologizing allegories of Mexican nationalism. A “fallen hero [who] awaits resurrection,” he figures Mexico’s need to extract redemption from the conquest. Moreover, Paz asserts that Cuauhtémoc as Christ figure is the 146   The Womb of the Patria

antagonist and complement to Malinche and her Catholic counterpart, the passive Virgin mother. If Malinche represents the betrayal of indigenous Mexico, Cuauhtémoc’s stoic resistance provides a masculine antidote to the supposed “abject passivity” of woman. However, in order to sustain the trope of woman as “violated mother,” Paz insists that we do not find the “darker attributes of the great goddesses: the lasciviousness of Amaterasu and Aphrodite, the cruelty of Artemis and Astarte, the sinister magic of Circe or the bloodlust of Kali,” in Mexico’s rich Mesoamerican or Christian pantheon of female archetypes.74 Like the museographers and Torres Bodet, Paz acknowledges Coatlicue—a “goddess” with “darker attributes” if ever there was one—only to turn a blind eye to her availability for the crafting of an alternative “redemption myth.” Paz, along with Torres Bodet and the museographers, eschews the procreative power of Coatlicue in favor of non-­ procreative “mothers” (i.e., virgins and whores). Simultaneously, they craft Cuauhtémoc as a procreative father and “origin” for modern Mexico. In this double move, they appropriate the generative process of the female body for the compensatory reproduction of male authority. Moreover, they disavow the power of Coatlicue as a figure of indigenousness in favor of the slain Cuauhtémoc, recast as both Christian martyr and modern hero through the language of secular republicanism. Cuauhtémoc thereby ceases to be the historical warrior murdered by Cortés and becomes instead the mythological father of modern mestizaje. For Paz, the discovery of Cuauhtémoc’s lost tomb would effect a “return to our origins” and allow the Mexican to “reunite” with his “ancestors.”75 For the museographers and Torres Bodet, the National Anthropology Museum brings the modern Mexican into communion with the spirit of Cuauhtémoc. In both formulations, Cuauhtémoc is resurrected as culture or spirit through the “eloquent silence” of objects or ruins. The mecha-

nisms of heritage, therefore, take on the life-­giving properties of creation. The museum, not indigenous women, is the matrix for the reproduction of indigenous Mexico. And the postrevolutionary state, not Coatlicue, is the all-­powerful father shaping the “sons of Malinche” from “our closed, stoic, impassive Indians” into the epic heroes of Mexican modernity.76 This nationalization of both Aztec resistance and the conquest ultimately serves to situate Mexico’s national “destiny” within the framework of an epic modernity. The museum’s preservation of the “vestiges of its past” reveals to the world not only the impressive depth of Mexican civilization but also the responsibility of the modern state. In protecting its patrimony, the federal government takes up the mantle of Cuauhtémoc’s cause, converting the rebellious spirit of the nation’s indigenous soul from an impulse toward death into a progressive desire for productive life. In this process of revaluation, the museum, through its pretense toward rational science and technocratic management, is the mechanism through which the destruction of México-­Tenochtitlán—the “seed of death in life”—becomes an object lesson for modern citizenship. To wit, Torres Bodet concludes: “The ceremony that brings us together admirably confirms that Cuauhtémoc did not die in vain. Alongside the remains of that which was, . . . Mexico rises: laboriously, with perseverance, daring and loyalty. Through the honor of the vestiges of its past, this Mexico has the conviction of pride in its own [stake?] in the universal, the prestige of its present, and the glory of its past.”77

The Aesthetic, Didactic, and Social Function of the Museum Through his clever interweaving of Mesoamerican culture, historical trauma, and modern nationalism, Torres Bodet rhetorically performed

the three functions—aesthetic, didactic, and social—he ascribed to the museum. The museum’s aesthetic function was to present pre-­Columbian art in a way that allowed the visitor to contemplate it “in the solitude of its pristine nakedness.”78 By this he meant that the archeological galleries used display techniques associated with the exhibition of fine art—highlighted objects placed on pedestals or in cases, with minimal didactics and dramatic lighting—in order to solicit the aesthetic gaze. The museum’s didactic function lay in the inclusion of contextualizing props—maps, orientation aids, “scenes that are lifelike approximations,” and the like—to educate the spectator about the “social significance of the works that charm him.”79 Thus, as an important but secondary effect, the museum’s displays were intended to turn the visitor’s immediate awe and wonder into an informed appreciation for Mexican culture, defined anthropologically. These props are overwhelmingly visual, as opposed to textual. A solution to the varying levels of literacy among the Mexican population, as well as the desire to communicate with non-­Spanish-­speaking foreigners, recourse to the visual can be traced directly to the Mexican mural movement and its turn to figuration to address its public. The didactic devices are far more prevalent in the second floor’s ethnographic galleries than in the first floor’s archeological displays. As at the National History Museum, certain collecting areas were less developed than others. The ethnographic collections, while greatly enhanced during the planning and building stages, lagged behind the museum’s rich Mesoamerican holdings in quantity and quality. Thus, as before, murals were enlisted to fill the gap between a diminished material culture and the aspirations of didactic exhibition. Finally, the museum’s social function was to present Mexico as a “bridge of truth, of concord and peace,” between the past and present, the “old” The Womb of the Patria  147

and “new” worlds, North and South America.80 Torres Bodet thus linked Mexico’s “respect for culture,” so evident in its new National Anthropology Museum, to the postwar state’s political and economic agenda to assert itself as a peaceful alternative to the two superpowers, and in particular to Western modernity as defined by the United States.81 Mexico’s alternative modernity modified “technical control” with “spirituality.”82 And culture, both the magnificence of ancient civilizations and the internationally renowned work of modern artists, represented Mexico’s particular claim on the human tradition. Like Fernando Gamboa’s traveling exhibition of Mexican art, the National Anthropology Museum was calibrated to assert monumentality as a unifying Kunstwollen connecting the figuration of the Mexican school of painting with the formal legacies of pre-­Columbian art. And like Gamboa with his cultural gambit, the organizers of the National Anthropology Museum sought to obscure the ideological and formal differences between the many competing schools and tendencies within the contemporary art scene, including the supposedly dehumanized forms of abstraction, in order to assert mural art (now signifying monumentally scaled work) as a sign of cultural acumen, not radical politics. For this reason, the organizers commissioned a wide variety of artists to execute monumental “murals” as an integral part of the museum’s exhibitions. While the foregoing discussion makes clear why museographers wanted to include murals in the new National Anthropology Museum, the questions of why artists wanted to be included in this massive state project remains. Moreover, how did these artists respond to the governmental ideology built into the museum’s architecture and exhibitions? Can we discern a critical political voice among the various commissioned works? Or did all the artists simply reiterate the exhibitionary 148   The Womb of the Patria

narrative of the museologic scenario throughout? To answer these questions, I turn now from the museum itself to the murals within.

The Murals From the Mexican School to la Ruptura: Mexican Art in the 1960s Twenty-­three artists worked on the project. There were social realists associated with the first and second generations of mural art and the Popular Graphic Workshop (Taller de Graphica Popular [tgp]), a radical printmaking collective, including celebrated figures like Raúl Anguiano, José Chávez Morado, Jorge González Camarena, Adolfo Mexiac, Pablo O’Higgins, and Alfredo Zalce, along with lesser-­known painters like Arturo Estrada, Arturo García Bustos, Nicolás Moreno (who replaced Dr. Atl), Fanny Rabel, Regina Raull, Valeta Swann, and Antonio Trejo. Also included were artists who opposed the Mexican school of painting, such as advocates of pure painting and abstraction like Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Mérida, and Nadine Prado and those associated with the Ruptura generation, such as Manuel Felguérez, Mathias Goeritz, and Rafael Coronel. Likewise, Leonora Carrington, a member of Mexico’s expatriate surrealist colony, participated. Finally, the museologists Luís Covarrubias and Iker Larrauri and the museum’s architect, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, contributed didactic supports, ethnographic maps, depictions of animal species, painted reconstructions, and the like. As this list of names and tendencies reveals, women, while outnumbered by men, were well represented in the commissions at this museum. Unlike the Palace of Fine Arts and the National History Museum, the National Anthropology Museum was calibrated, from the start, to tes-

tify to the achievements of modern Mexico, and women’s equality was one of the rhetorical claims of the López Mateo’s regime. Moreover, the planners’ desire to include all tendencies in the contemporary art scene created an opening for women artists that muralism never offered. While women participated in mural painting as assistants, very few were able to garner high-­profile commissions for themselves because of a host of barriers ranging from the obligations of traditional feminine roles, economic disadvantage, and masculinist assumptions about women’s capacity for arduous labor to outright sexism in the ranks of the avant-­garde and the state. With the exception of the Greenwood sisters’ epic cycles at the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market in Mexico City, women artists did not enjoy high-­profile federal commissions.83 Despite this fact, however, there were many women active in the Mexican art world throughout the twentieth century. As the careers of Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo suggest, women were more likely to find support among private patrons and commercial galleries. Without large walls to paint on, most women artists opted (or preferred) to work on a more intimate scale until the advent of installation art in the late 1960s. Finally, the withering away of the political mandate for artists to work collectively, for the public, or in permanent media like fresco or Siqueiros’s various experimental alternatives opened the door for more conventional media within the realm of monumental art. Thus, mural art’s loss was, paradoxically, women’s gain. While by no means stylistically uniform, the vast majority of mural art in the museum was executed by artists working within the figurative social realist tradition pioneered by Diego Rivera and, to a lesser extent, José Clemente Orozco. These works, for the most part, function as didactic supports for the displays around them. They illustrate

pre-­Hispanic myth (Raul Anguiano’s Gods of Life and Death) and practice (Alfredo Zalce’s mural depicting the building of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl), they offer reconstructed views of Mesoamerican cities (Antonio Trejo’s Valley of Monte Albán), and they limn views of Mexico’s celebrated regional landscapes and stoic rural populations (Nicolás Moreno’s The Valley of Teotihuacán and Adolfo Mexiac’s Campesinos and Fishermen). With a few exceptions, like the spare depictions of the Tarascan highlands at the time of conquest by Pablo O’Higgins, these paintings are aesthetically pedestrian and so fully integrated into the exhibitionary space as to be almost unnoticed as works of art in and of themselves. Whereas the artists who executed works for the National History Museum came in after the fact to enhance lackluster or impoverished displays of material culture, the artists at the National Anthropology Museum were included from the very start. As integral members of the original twenty-­five teams, they worked closely with museographers, designers, and architects to craft effective displays. Ramírez Vázquez equates the common purpose and spirit of collaboration between the artists and museographers with the collective nature of church building during the Renaissance.84 And the correspondence between the architect and several of the artists reveals that the artists too viewed their participation in the project as a high point in their careers. It would seem that in the nineteen months before the museum’s official opening, artists, both those associated with the Mexican school and those historically opposed to it, were uniformly honored to be contributing to this monument to Mexican modernity. Just as Tamayo’s commissions for the Palace of Fine Arts signaled the triumph of pure painting over the hegemony of los tres grandes, the inclusion of many artists who, like Cuevas, had felt stymied by the cactus curtain in the marquee The Womb of the Patria  149

project of the decade represented the achievement of cultural democracy after decades of social realist orthodoxy. All participating artists were allowed to interpret the themes and cultures they had been assigned according to their own sensibilities. Free to put their particular aesthetic worldview on display, the artists represented a wide array of formal and conceptual attitudes about the mestizo nation’s indigenous soul. Many works deviate in obvious or subtle ways from the technocratic perspective of the displays themselves. However, none intervenes in the exhibitionary script as Siqueiros had when illustrating the revolution for the National History Museum. Rather, their deviance from museum dogma is discernible primarily in the aesthetic polemics of style and, to a lesser extent, in often very personal or hermetic approaches to the ethnographic subjects of their works. This agnosticism toward the ideology of institutional practice follows from Rufino Tamayo’s intervention into the formal and material strategies of public art. Tamayo’s adherence to pure painting was more than a mere rejection of the leftist social realism of his peers; it also encompassed an alternative vision of Mexican modernity and the legacies of its indigenous antiquity and colonial past. As early as 1933, in an essay entitled “Nationalism and the Pictorial Movement,” published in Crisol, an avant-­garde art journal, Tamayo voiced his critique of what he described as the “skin-­deep” pictorial nationalism of his peers and called for a new direction. Tamayo argued for a modern art that would build from the “intuitive” formal legacies of Mesoamerican sculpture and reflect the somber palette of everyday folklife while maintaining a commitment to exploring the plastic problems of pure painting. “France,” he concluded, “gives us a contemporary example of the excellence of this way of working. A marvelous laboratory where they search constantly for 150   The Womb of the Patria

new avenues for art and where, without seeking it, painting is given an absolutely French face.”85 Seven years later, in his scandalizing denunciation of muralism, The Cloud and the Clock (La nube y el reloj), the critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón cemented Tamayo’s emblematic status as the embodiment and leading light of this new direction in Mexican art, writing, “His painting is Mexican because he is preoccupied not with making it Mexican but rather with good painting.”86 It is for this reason that in his satirical essay “The Cactus Curtain,” José Luis Cuevas includes “maintain[ing] to the point of nausea that Rufino Tamayo was a traitor . . . corrupted by Paris” in his list of patriotic sentiments mandated by the “abbot-­like functionaries” who brokered an artist’s access to professional acclaim.87 Tamayo thus represented an important link between the oppositional aesthetics of the early avant-­garde and the post–World War II generation known as la Ruptura (the Rupture). La Ruptura was defined not by any single style but rather by its opposition to the dogmatism and hegemony of Mexican muralism in the art world, and Cuevas was its self-­appointed leader. This loosely defined generation centered on figurative artists like Cuevas, Alberto Gironella, Arnold Belkin, Francisco Icaza, and Pedro and Rafael Coronel, but it also included non-­objective trajectories such as the “emotional” architecture and abstraction of Mathias Goeritz, the additive metal sculptures of Manuel Felguérez, the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Theater of Panic, and the Dadaesque provocations of Pedro Friedeberg. Despite the more radical non-­objective and performance-­based work of members of this generation, in general, the artists associated with la Ruptura worked within an expressive figurative idiom.88 However, their paintings and drawings emphasized individual subjectivity rather than descriptions of the external world. As adherents

of existentialism, their work tended to focus on the social margin, for example, pimps, prostitutes, lunatics, consumptives, and tragic artistic figures like Van Gogh, Goya, and Kafka. However, they did not advocate a subaltern politics, like Siqueiros had, but instead they presented abject humanity as evidence of the corruption of the modern world. In addition to Tamayo and the Contemporaneos group, the painters of the postwar generation were indebted to Orozco’s satirical caricatures and dystopian murals, such as Catharsis (1934, figure 6). However, whereas Orozco emphasized the failures of modernity as part of a moral critique of contemporary politics, the artists of the postwar generation emphasized the ugly and irrational as part of a generalized expression of existential angst that in the end was felt to be powerless in the face of contemporary events. In their exploration of psychology they explicitly rejected the muralists’ desire to effect political change. Instead, they adhered to the postwar psychologization of politics promoted in the writings of Harold Rosenberg, Selden Rodman, and Octavio Paz.89 For these artists, the corruption of social realism by the Soviet and Mexican states mandated that artists abandon painted polemics in favor of expressing the political crisis of the age through the “tragic and timeless” themes of their work90— what Paz referred to as moving painting from “criticism to offering.”91 Despite a similar antipathy to Mexican muralism and a preference for existential themes, these artists represent different and often antagonistic camps within the Mexican avant-­garde. For example, even though the artists associated with la Ruptura celebrated Tamayo for his commitment to pure painting, Tamayo viewed this younger generation with suspicion. He felt no affinity with their tendency to psychologize painting and indulge personal pathology. Likewise, they came to

reject him as ultimately too decorous. Thus the artists employed at the National Anthropology Museum represented not only the decades-­long opposition between the social realism of the Mexican school and the pure painters associated with Tamayo but also the many fault lines within the postwar avant-­garde. As such, these commissions anticipated the sea change in Mexican art that took place over the 1960s by staging a confrontation between the many stylistic tendencies vying for official approbation and public recognition. A survey of the murals executed by key figures within this emergent generation will reveal the subtle differences in their approaches to Mexican modernity and its Mesoamerican past.

Mural Aesthetics and Mesoamerica Tamayo’s Mytho-­poetic Mesoamerica %%Tamayo was given pride of place by his good friend Ramírez Vázquez. His mural, Duality (1964), is located in the museum’s grand lobby, where it prepares the viewer for the exhibitionary emphasis on the drama and destiny of Mexico’s indigenous legacy (figure 41). Painted in Vinylite on canvas in colossal dimensions (approximately eleven feet tall by forty feet wide), Duality recalls Tamayo’s career-­long interest in racial and cultural fusion as well as his more existential explorations of man’s struggle to negotiate his material embodiment and longing for transcendence. However, in earlier murals, he staged this theme through the confrontation between past and present, tradition and modernity, the terrestrial realm and the cosmos. In Duality he rephrases it through the great Mesoamerican epic of good versus evil dramatized in the battle between the Christlike figure of Quetzalcoatl and the satanic Tzecatlipoca.92 In this work, Tamayo allows color and simple

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41 Rufino Tamayo, Duality, 1964

monumental forms to convey the idea of an opposition and balance that is at once violent and harmonious. A serpent and jaguar face off in a fierce battle to renew the universe. The jade-­green Quetzalcoatl occupies the entire left half of the composition. Associated with the life-­giving rays of a brilliant sun, he spirals across a fiery red field and is met by the equally powerful spotted jaguar, ruler of the night, and associated with the murky underworld. Tezcatlipoca encompasses the entire right half of the composition; his dynamic body lunges across a cobalt-­blue sky dotted with constellations and a yellow moon in ascent. Tamayo captures these two feral creatures in the moment of their fierce engagement. The outcome of their battle is not foretold; rather their equal but opposite force is held in dynamic tension. While the myth of Quetzalcoatl appears in numerous pre-­Columbian cultures, the references here are derived from Aztec sources emanating from the time of conquest. Thus the struggle to renew the universe through epic battle takes on prophetic dimensions as night befalls Tenochtitlán at the dawn of Christian conquest. In this respect, Tamayo’s mural echoes Torres Bodet’s attempts to rationalize the conquest through his evoca152   The Womb of the Patria

tions of Mesoamerican cosmology. However, unlike Torres Bodet and Chávez Morado, who also invokes the battle between serpent and jaguar at the base of his column, Tamayo makes no reference to the nation-­state or its progressive claim on modernity. Moreover, his mural, while drawn from Aztec cosmology, can hardly be called didactic. It offers no resolution and thereby implies no progress; it refrains from linking the past to the present and thus locates us within the realm of myth, not a future-­oriented reality. Unlike so many of his contemporaries working at the museum, Tamayo does not present the visitor with an ethnographic illustration or a literal reference to historical events. Rather, as a highly poetic interpretation of pre-­Columbian myth, Duality serves as metaphor for the universal struggle between good and evil, life and death, or what one author described as “a fatal and irreversible confrontation with destiny . . . the phenomenon of being.”93 As he had in his Palace of Fine Arts murals, Tamayo transforms the traumas of national history into the stuff of modern myth and metaphor. Therefore, rather than putting ancient cosmology in the service of technocratic statecraft, as Torres Bodet does, he posits Mexico’s

“duality” as an emblem of the struggles faced by all humanity. Coronel’s Existential Oaxaca %%If Tamayo’s mural presents visitors with a mytho-­poetic spin on Mexico’s violent mestizo imaginary, Rafael Coronel’s mural depicting the syncretic ethno-­culture in Oaxaca represents an even darker take on the existential legacies of indigenous culture and its sublimation in the Christian conquest (figure 42). In keeping with his predilection for the macabre, Coronel painted his mural in a dark palette of black, purple, deep crimson, ochre, and grey. The iconography circulates around the figure of a nearly naked boy located in the lower central foreground of the canvas. This dark child crosses his arms as though suffering from the cold, or perhaps suggesting a near-­ death state. Around him figures swirl in a loosely articulated landscape that simultaneously evokes

the mountainous climes, rich marine life, and subterranean burial pits that characterize Oaxaca, one of the most geographically and culturally diverse regions in Mexico. To the boy’s right, Coronel has depicted a rudimentary scaffolding suggesting both the wooden suspension bridges that Oaxacans use to cross water and the lashed posts used to build traditional huts. And yet this structure seems makeshift and fragile, even evoking prison bars. Interspersed throughout this ambiguous space are skulls, half-­naked men, and animals, as well as icons derived from Oaxaca’s many syncretic religious processions, such as Christ’s disembodied head adorned with the crown of thorns, which is associated with Good Friday processions and Three Kings Day, celebrated on the Epiphany. There are numerous identifiable references to Oaxaca’s rich ethno-­culture, such as the iguanas from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the tor42 Rafael Coronel, Oaxaca gallery mural, 1964

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43 Arturo Estrada, detail of The Hill of the Virgin and

the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina, in Juquila, 1964

toises whose shells the Huave use as musical instruments, the black clay made famous by the potters of San Bartolo Coyotepec, and the hallucinogenic mushrooms used in psychotropic healing rituals by the Mazatec. And yet these elements are more evocative than illustrative. They suggest the dark forces and beings that animate a nightmare. Thus the images may be intended to illustrate the hallucinations of a sick boy. According to Mazatec folklore, the sick are those who have lost their souls. They must ingest psychotropic mushrooms in order to discover the hidden causes of their illness so that the healer can cure them. Interpreted in this way, the boy in the foreground stands in for the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca/ Mexico haunted by nightmares and subject to superstitions emanating from the traumas of the conquest. Coronel is most likely referring to the contemporary cult surrounding the Mazatecan 154   The Womb of the Patria

curandera (healer) María Sabina, who as early as 1962 was garnering a following of local and international youths seeking enlightenment through participation in the velada (healing ritual). But given Coronel’s interest in existentialism, the child must also be understood as a symbol of the more generalized angst of a modern world in crisis. This theme is a constant in Coronel’s work, in which he externalizes his own sense of personal despair in paintings of isolated, distorted figures menaced by unarticulated fears and anxieties. If we compare Coronel’s highly subjective interpretation of Oaxacan culture and daily life with Arturo Estrada’s mural depicting the Good Friday procession that takes place in Oaxaca City every Easter weekend, his deviance from the folkloric tendencies of the second-­generation mural artists becomes self-­evident (figure 43). Estrada’s Oaxaca is sunny and lush, filled with the pastel colors asso-

ciated with the tropics. The procession is orderly and devout, demonstrating the religious piety and humility of contemporary rural Mexicans. His style is heavily derivative of Rivera’s murals at the sep. Like Rivera, he depicts his figures as homogenized; their features are smoothed and idealized. The men wear the white cotton “uniform” of the rural peasantry, while the women don simple traditional dress. In this respect, Estrada’s mural perfectly complements the museum’s displays dedicated to contemporary indigenous populations in Oaxaca. Coronel’s mural, on the other hand, confounds every folkloric assumption the viewer might have about this legendary region of Mexico. Instead of presenting a reassuring image of rural peasantry soothed by their communal rituals and faith in God, he presents the viewer with bodies ravaged by premature aging, hunger, and fear. Their syncretic rituals seem not to sustain them but rather to make their souls sick. In this sense Coronel’s mural counters the rationalizing thrust of the museum’s ethnographic displays. It argues that the ethno-­cultural practices of Oaxaca’s indigenous populations are pathological expressions of trauma and, in this sense, deeply irrational. For Coronel and his cohort, irrationality was a hallmark of the crisis culture of the atomic age (a crisis signaled by the desire of Western youths to be cured by María Sabina). Therefore, unlike Chávez Morado, who imaged Mexico’s progressive future through references to mestizaje and atomic energy, Coronel implicitly rejects notions of progress that are predicated on either racial and cultural fusion or scientific rationality. He argues instead that Mexican culture is atavistic and that mestizaje—forged in conquest—is one of the hidden causes of its illness. Goeritz’s Spiritual Huichol %%Mathias

Goeritz took a different approach when creating monumental works for the Huichol

displays in the second-­floor ethnographic galleries (figures 44, 45, 46, and 47). Marrying his own interest in Bauhaus construction with Huichol fiber arts, he crafted three large textile “murals.” While these works display strong affinities with the two-­dimensional plane of traditional mural art, they are also sculptural objects. Their materiality and function as spatial dividers make them simultaneously structural components of the architecture. In this sense they represent Goeritz’s attempts to integrate architecture, design, painting, and sculpture into a total work of art. Goeritz sought to reimbue modernist form with the spirituality that postwar functionalism and formalist modernism had stripped from the interwar avant-­ gardes. Likewise, by advocating a complete integration of art and architecture, he challenged the muralists’ attempts at plastic integration and their “demagogic use of the wall support.”94 Goeritz’s art was therefore a direct attack on Mexican muralism, not only in its rejection of figuration in favor of abstraction, but also in its adherence to the “new modernity” of the post– World War II period in Mexico.95 Rather than espousing a utopian politics rooted in the ideology of revolution, Goeritz embraced the promise of “construction, architecture, industry, urbanization and technology” that characterized state projects and public works like the cu and the National Anthropology Museum.96 However, he also courted a regressive and anti-­modern mysticism at odds with the technocratic attitude of his patrons at the museum. Like the Huichol, Goeritz generated his abstract imagery by creating patterns with ropes of different hues and thickness and then securing them with glue to a wooden surface. The ropes are coiled into a dense surface of repeating parallelograms, rhomboids, and diamonds, and more organic shapes that loosely resemble the patterns in traditional Huichol votive boards. Whereas the Huichol use brightly colored yarn and beads in The Womb of the Patria  155

44–45 Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in Huichol-­Cora gallery, 1964

46–47 Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in

Huichol-­Cora gallery, 1964

their highly elaborate embroidery and fiber arts, Goeritz opted to maintain the natural hues of the ixtle fiber. Thus his works for the National Anthropology Museum reflect his interest in the informel, an international vanguard tendency that sought aesthetic renewal by working with impoverished materials. Goeritz used materials endowed with metaphysical, spiritual, and primitive associations like gold leaf, found nails, weathered wood, and in this case ixtle. He also employed traditional craftsmen in the manufacture of his objects in an attempt to reinfuse modernist art with the collective spirit of folk art or guild production in the Middle Ages.97 What appear to be minimalist abstractions or kinetic works were for him emotional objects imbued with the atavistic traces of the pre-­modern world. Thus, unlike his peers in the various concrete art movements, Goeritz does not proclaim through abstraction a utopian faith in progress. Rather, his emotional art and architecture craft modernist form as a vehicle for a regressive mysticism rooted in collective rather than individual values. In this sense, his fiber murals are a modern iteration of Huichol life ways and cosmology, not emblems of pure form. While his works would seem to recapitulate the nationalized functionalism of Ramírez Vázquez’s museum architecture, it points in the opposite direction. Whereas Ramírez Vázquez rooted the international style in pre-­ Hispanic prototypes in order to proclaim the “ancient modernity” of the Mexican republic, Goeritz intended to undermine the claims of technocratic progress by insisting on the persistence of a deep anti-­modern ethos animating the material environment with forces best ascertained through faith and feeling rather than rational intellection. Goeritz’s interest in spiritualism, like that of Coronel, was prompted by the traumas of World War II. However, rather than receding into the nihilism of psychosis, he hoped to re-­enchant the 158   The Womb of the Patria

48 Adolfo Mexiac, Campesinos, 1964

world. Instead of presenting the ethno-­culture of Mexico’s indigenous peoples as a pathological expression of modernity, he argues for its redemptive spiritualism. This attitude toward indigenism deviates as well from that espoused by the Mexican school evident in the more militant social realism of Adolfo Mexiac’s “murals” in the ethnographic galleries (figure 48). Mexiac, a printmaker, translated the graphic print tradition of the tgp into monumental carved wood reliefs depicting rural peasants fishing, farming, and arrayed stoically in family units that resemble the allegorical figure groups on the Monument to the Revolution. They aggrandize the peasant through their scale and iconography. Likewise, Mexiac’s direct-­carving technique and reference to the print tradition index the postrevolutionary interest in this “popular” medium. Like Diego Rivera’s

paintings and the prints produced at the tgp, Mexiac’s works craft the peasant as a laborer and thereby the working-­class agent of Mexican history and national cultural renewal. Carrington’s Magical Maya %%Through

her friendship with Ignacio Bernal (the museum’s first director), Leonora Carrington was commissioned to execute a mural for the ethnographic galleries dedicated to the highland Maya of Chiapas.98 At nearly seven by fifteen feet, her casein-­on-­panel “mural,” The Magical World of the Maya, is the largest painting in her oeuvre and her only public commission (figure 49). A British expatriate, Carrington relocated to Mexico in 1943 as a result of the displacements of World War II. While she had exhibited with the surrealists in the 1930s and her work been collected by the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, her real success came in Mexico when Inés Amour became her dealer. In 1960 she had her first retrospective, and in 1961, her adoptive homeland included her as a “Mexican” artist in an exhibition of contemporary Mexican portraits.99 Thus her commission in 1963 to paint a mural for the National Anthropology Museum must have confirmed her sense of personal and professional arrival. While Carrington had a long association with the surrealist movement, and especially the circle of renegade surrealists around Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret, she routinely denied any orthodox relationship with its aesthetic prescriptions or the paternal authority of André Breton. She was friends with Diego Rivera and admired the magical realism of Frida Kahlo, but she was not an overtly political artist and never sought entrée into the federal cultural project.100 Her work does partake of the psychic automatism promoted by illusionistic surrealists like her former lover Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. However, the hallucinatory quality of her paintings belies a specific and

highly personal iconography steeped in her study of esoteric traditions, alchemy, syncretic Catholicism, and a proto-­feminist mysticism. Thus the opportunity to study and then limn her vision of the sophisticated syncretic folklife of the Maya must have held great personal interest for her, despite her legendary antipathy to group endeavors and figures of (especially masculine) authority. The Magical World of the Maya is divided into three horizontal registers that depict the celestial, terrestrial, and subterranean realms. A mountainous landscape mediates between the underworld, depicted in cutaway fashion along the lowest register, and the heavens. Clearly identifiable icons, such as the Catholic churches of San Cristóbal de las Casas and San Juan Chamula and the monumental crosses erected in Romerillo—the so-­ called pantheon of Romerillo—locate the scene among the Tzotzil and Tzeltal and the annual religious processions that take place as part of regional All Souls’ Day and All Saints’ Day celebrations. Intermingled with these references to the contemporary material world we find personages and objects associated with the realm of myth. To the left of center, Carrington has painted a fantastical version of the Maya cross, an axis mundi or “world tree,” which in Mayan visual culture is often depicted with anthropomorphic features101 This tree is one of several objects in the mural that mediate between the upper and lower worlds, allowing the souls of the deceased to traverse from one realm to the next. Just below it, Carrington situates a rainbow that seems to originate at the site of the Church of San Juan Chamula. Diminutive figures—half human and half animal—embark upon a journey, suggesting the ritual communion with ancestors that the Day of the Dead celebrations enable. While the rainbow may refer to the colorful flower arches that adorn Maya crosses in order to suggest the “path ornamented with flowers”102 that marks the daily The Womb of the Patria  159

49 Leonora Carrington, The Magical World of the Maya, 1963

course of the rising and setting sun, more likely it is a reference to Ix Chel, or “Lady Rainbow,” the female figure of the Creator couple.103 Like Coatlicue, Ix Chel embodies dualities. She is associated with “divination, weaving, medicine, healing and childbirth” as well as “floods, destruction, serpents, and war.”104 Carrington seems to have emphasized her role as a powerful healer, for the rainbow culminates in a hut where figures are engaged in healing ceremonies practiced by the curanderos from the village of Zincantán (known as the House of the Bats). Just to the right of this hut, we see a bare ceiba rooted in the dark underworld and marking the place of a cave where the pagan earth gods are worshipped by the Tzeltal. The ceiba, another Mayan figure of origins, seems to reach out to grasp a flock of anthropomorphized bats that swoop down from a fanciful ruin that rises like an apparition into the celestial realm. Carrington spent time in Chiapas researching the beliefs and practices of the highland Maya. While there, she lived with the Swiss anthropologist Gertrude Blom, a specialist on the Lacondon Maya. She also gained access to local curanderos. And upon her return to Mexico City, she steeped herself in the study of the creation myths of the Quiche Maya recounted in the Popol Vuh.105 Her direct experience with the region and its people is evident in her mural. However, even a cursory analysis reveals that this is not intended to be an ethnographic document. Rather, the image is suffused with Carrington’s well-­established but highly oblique personal iconography. For example, the large white horse that takes its place next to the Church of San Juan Chamula is probably a reference to Carrington herself. The white horse had been a proxy for the artist in numerous paintings and stories throughout her career.106 Moreover, the dainty, elongated animal-­human hybrids throughout the mural bear no resemblance to the visual traditions of the ancient or contemporary 162   The Womb of the Patria

Maya. Rather they correspond with Carrington’s mature style and image repertoire. These figures recur throughout her prolific oeuvre no matter what esoteric tradition she treats. While the mural ostensibly focuses on the hybrid form of Catholicism practiced by the contemporary Maya, it reflects Carrington’s interest in feminine esoteric knowledge. Her reference to Ix Chel undermines the absolute authority of the Catholic Church signaled by the dominating presence of the two cathedrals upon the highland landscape. Juxtaposed with or even superseding these monuments are airy references to the ancient sun and moon gods, represented in two orbs as well as in their natural aspect in the sky. In addition to the attributes described above, Ix Chel is also associated with the moon and in some myths appears as the wife of the sun or his sister. In one Mayan myth, Ix Chel incurs the jealousy of her husband, the sun, who casts out her eye as punishment for an affair with his brother. Thereafter Ix Chel shines less brightly than her husband, thus accounting for the softer light of the moon.107 In Carrington’s mural, Ix Chel is represented at least three times (as lunar orb, the moon, and a rainbow), while her various powers as a healer or conjurer of storms (the green serpent) are indexed throughout. Thus, Carrington places extra emphasis on the feminine aspect of Mayan cosmology, and this was certainly a by-­product of her own proto-­feminist sensibilities as well as her traumatic biography. Living in France during the occupation, Carrington had a psychotic break that forced her into a mental institution after she fled to Spain for safety. This break was associated with the internment of her much older lover and partner, Max Ernst. Carrington was ultimately able to turn this personal trauma into a series of powerful stories and paintings, and it deeply affected her conceptions of the self thereafter. In “Down

Below,” her autobiographical account of her breakdown, Carrington imagines herself as “the Moon, an essential element of the Trinity, with a microscopic knowledge of the earth, its plants and creatures.”108 Just one of her hallucinatory fantasies, this passage reflects her desire to assert woman (and herself) as an essential component and therefore corrective to the patriarchal structure of the Christian Trinity. Additionally, in her Portrait of Max Ernst (1939), dated to just before Ernst’s internment and her nervous breakdown, she represents herself twice in the figure of a white horse, once as a statue-­like beast frozen in the arctic landscape, and again as an ephemeral creature encased within a blue lantern carried by Ernst. The image suggests entrapment within a hostile environment, but it also positions her proxy self (the lantern-­encased horse) as a source of cool light guiding Ernst’s way. Biographers confirm that Carrington rebelled against the surrealist role of the femme enfant and that ultimately she chafed against Ernst’s influence.109 Thus it is fairly easy to interpret her interest in the myth of Ix Chel through her own struggles with a “sun god” threatened by her brilliant glow. Like Ix Chel, Carrington was ultimately wounded by circumstances linked to Ernst, and thereafter she burned less brightly but won a fragile independence. Susan Aberth notes that after her mental illness, Carrington regarded herself as physically and psychologically vulnerable. This catalyzed both her interest in the ancient healing practices of Mexican curanderos and an ambivalent fascination with Mexico’s “haunted” cultural landscape.110 Carrington had always indulged in pagan beliefs tied to the Celtic myths she learned about from her Irish grandmother. She also had a special affinity for animals from childhood on. Describing her identification with the animals that populate her paintings as aspects of her “inner bestiary,” Carrington understood herself to be comprised of

multiple selves. After her mental breakdown, she considered her psychotic self to be yet another one of these selves, existing and co-­present with her healthy self. This particular view of identity resonated with Mayan belief about souls. According to the Tzotzil, every plant, animal, and object in the world has a soul. Human beings have several souls as well as an animal double that lives a parallel life. When people fall ill, their souls have been harmed and a healer is required to determine, through dreams, how and the extent to which the soul has been damaged.111 Given Carrington’s personal beliefs, it is clear she intermingled her own experience with the practices and mythology of the ancient and contemporary Maya. The painting is at once an eclectic compendium of Mayan myth, rituals, and folk culture and a highly personal iteration of her own biography and feminist identity. Carrington’s mural, like those of Goeritz and Coronel, reflects her respect for and fascination with the syncretic comingling of ancient indigenous culture and modern autochthonous Mexico. Unlike Coronel, who depicts religious syncretism as a source of sickness, Carrington celebrates religious and cultural hybridity as a system of esoteric “magic” capable of healing the modern subject. In this respect, her vision, if not her idiom, is more akin to Goeritz’s emotional art. Moreover, she associates the healing power of indigenous culture with the feminine. Thus the mural forges a veiled feminist or at least feminized world from Mayan mythology and practice. Her depiction of the Maya, therefore, deviates in the extreme from the overwhelmingly masculinist vision of mestizaje built into the museum’s exhibitionary ­rhetoric.

The Politics of Primitivism As these examples attest, the artists working for Ramírez Vázquez took very different approaches The Womb of the Patria  163

to the official indigenismo of their patron. Tamayo mythologizes the Indian, Coronel pathologizes him; Estrada romanticizes, Goeritz spiritualizes, Mexiac proletarianizes, and Carrington feminizes. Yet no matter how different, each approach posits a temporal distinction between the folkways and lives of indigenous peoples and those of the modern world. The varying attitudes of these artists toward Mexico’s indigenous peoples, past and present, conform to the modalities of “primitivism”—romantic, emotional, intellectual, and the subconscious—that Robert Goldwater delineated in 1938.112 Within the Mexican context, artistic primitivism cannot be separated from the historical legacies and present-­day realities of racialized social inequality. Thus the primitivist modalities on display in the “mural” art at the National Anthropology Museum reflect, in Cuauhtémoc Medina’s words, the symptomatic tendency among elites in Mexico to “subdue and revalue” a “resistant and archaic” past that always threatens to undermine postcolonial modernity. Medina names this variant of primitivism the “Indo-­American Gothic” and argues that it characterizes much of the postwar painting in Mexico. “The supposition that the continent’s historic nucleus represents a metaphysical threat,” he writes, “is the fundamental theme of the essays through which Mexican intellectuals represented the drama of modernization and their own role in it.”113 I would add that this is likewise a fundamental theme in the visual production of artists “represent[ing] the drama of modernization and their own role in it.” Therefore, rather than viewing works like those by Tamayo, Goeritz, Carrington, and Coronel in opposition to the “Mexican curio” and its bureaucratic counterpart, the technocratic faith in an assimilated modernity expressed in state projects like the National Anthropology Museum, we should see these “murals” as its Janus face. We see on one 164   The Womb of the Patria

side a recuperative primitivism that transmutes trauma into modern myth or politics and, on the other, a more sinister primitivism that locates the failures and violence of the modern world within the hermetic Indian cultures of the Americas. Given the antipathy of several of these artists to the postrevolutionary cultural project and their deviation from museum dogma, it begs the question as to why they participated at all and, furthermore, why their government sponsors accepted their deviant perspectives. Medina’s reading of the Indo-­American Gothic as a symptom of postcolonial anxiety helps us to better understand the relationship between the state functionaries who planned the National Anthropology Museum and those artists whose participation in the project would seem to betray their oppositional stance toward official culture. Both groups viewed modernization as an antidote to the legacies of conquest and colonization. Likewise, both acknowledged that the nation’s Indian past and present held the key to its originality and contribution to the modern world. The difference lay in the degree to which they felt that this “other Mexico” continued to haunt and obfuscate the collective dream of modernity. Medina asserts that Octavio Paz’s essay The Labyrinth of Solitude (el labertino de la soledad) (1950) is emblematic of the “ambiguous position filled with fear and admiration” of the “Gothic” attitude toward this other Mexico.114 In turn, his essay helps us to better situate the mural projects at the National Anthropology Museum within the collective enthusiasm for modernization that characterized the López Mateos administration and its sexenio project.

Mexico as the “Labyrinth of Mankind” Paz published The Labyrinth of Solitude at the very moment the nation began to experience the eco-

nomic effects of the Mexican Miracle. A psycho-­ historical attempt to explain the nation’s underdevelopment, Paz’s essay also reveals a tentative faith in Mexico’s nascent modernization. He devotes half of the text to diagnosing the “harsh solitude” of the Mexican personality, a formal, dissimulating, violent, and “hermetic being.”115 As discussed in chapter 1, Paz attributes the Mexican’s tendency to wear “masks” to the nation’s violent origins in the Spanish conquest, which he configures as a seduction/rape of the Indian mother.116 In the second half of his essay he turns to history, tracing the successive attempts of elites to unify the “sons of Malinche” through the universalizing values of Catholicism and liberalism. Paz argues that these projects failed to vanquish the “ghosts” of the conquest and instead only exacerbated social inequality, leading inevitably to revolution. While the revolution of 1910 reacquainted Mexico with its true “self”—that is, its indigenous origins and oppressed peasant underclass—it too failed to resolve the contradictions of Mexican history. For Paz, the global catastrophe of World War II, not the revolution, offered Mexicans a way out of the “labyrinth of solitude.” Paz argues that rather than holding Mexico back, the nation’s historical wounds give it a privileged relationship to the postwar crisis of modernity. World War II and the Holocaust had proved that Europe was no more civilized than the purportedly barbarous cultures of the Americas. Cast adrift from the cultural certainties of the past, Europeans too found themselves struggling to account for the political and economic failures of liberal governance, social democracy, and the nation-­state. Furthermore, the atomic bomb turned conventional warfare and its capacity to destroy civilizations into the power to annihilate all humanity. This, ironically, placed all nations and individuals on equal footing, forging a terrifying universal from the culture of death. In a

characteristic passage worth quoting at length, Paz writes: The contemporary crisis is not a struggle between two diverse cultures . . . but rather an internal quarrel in a civilization that no longer has any rivals, a civilization whose future is the future of the whole world. Each man’s fate is that of man himself. . . . Ever since World War II we have been aware that the self-­creation demanded of us by our national realities is no different from that which similar realities are demanding of others. The past has left us orphans, as it has the rest of the planet, and we must join together in reinventing our common future. World history has become everyone’s task, and our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of mankind.117

Ironically, World War II had solved the ­problem of Mexico’s stigmatic past. For when Aztec sacrifice or the cruelty of the conquest was contemplated alongside the Nazi Holocaust and the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, modern Mexico’s troubling origins no longer seemed uniquely or even particularly barbarous. On the contrary, Mexico was now poised to lead a war-­traumatized West into a new era, one in which the certainties of reason, science, and liberal humanism had lost their purchase. Paz’s assessment of Mexico’s national character and pathologies is certainly critical; however, as this passage indicates, it culminates in a hopeful prognosis for the future, one that hinges upon love as a reconciliatory route toward a re-­enchanted modernity. For Paz, the dialectic of “withdrawal and return” that characterizes Mexican nationalism is a symptom of a “longing for the body from which we were cast out . . . a longing for place.”118 Conceived as a motherless son, the modern Mexican, like all modern men in the age of reason, longs for a return to the womb—“the navel of the universe”—in order to regain his sense of belongThe Womb of the Patria  165

ing and to overcome the agonies of solitude.119 Paz argues this solitude can only be surpassed through myth, not the political reason that bourgeois elites turned to in the past. Citing the labyrinth as the ur-­form of most origin myths, Paz writes, “Every moribund or sterile society attempts to save itself by creating a redemption myth which is also a fertility myth, a creation myth . . . solitude and sin,” he concludes, “are resolved in communion and fertility”120 Thus the “labyrinth” of his title is both a figuration of Mexican hermeticism and a recuperation of historical trauma as a modern fertility myth. As this synopsis reveals, Paz’s diagnosis of the Mexican character is explicitly a description of the vexed experience of Mexican masculinity. While he attempts to trouble the gender politics of Mexican nationalism, his primitivism ultimately participates in the masculinist project of national allegory, wherein the modern Mexican’s oedipal revolt against the Indian mother is always construed as a problem of male subjectivity.121 This is why Paz’s essay returns compulsively to the problem of woman, defined via Simone de Beauvoir as an “object” and an “other,” but never a “self.”122 In this respect, Paz replicates the patriarchal rhetoric of the state and participates in not only the primitivizing project to “subdue and revalue . . . a resistant and archaic” past but also the feminization of the Indian “other.” While never explicitly endorsing a return to Aztec origins, Paz does proffer Aztec mythology as Mexico’s equivalent to Greek and Roman examples. Implicitly, he configures the rejection of reason (read: the scientific rationality of the West) as a return to the body of the Indian mother, “a return to the maternal womb,” the womb of the patria.123 This communion with the nation’s Indian self will finally make Mexico both modern and universal. Paz’s essay, while rejecting Torres

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Bodet’s investment in scientific rationality, nonetheless resonates with his attempts to reclaim pre-­Columbian culture for the modern nation and thereby overcome the pathologies of colonization. While Torres Bodet embraced science, Paz argues for myth. And while Torres Bodet proffered Cuauhtémoc as the mythical founder of a modern mestizo state, Paz implies—through erudite reference to Francisco Goya’s 1798 etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters—that art can bring the modern (Mexican) man back into a symbiotic relation with his (Indian) mother. Ironically, Rufino Tamayo was the symbolic lynchpin in articulations of both the dialectic of primitivism and Mexican modernity. Recall that Paz had inaugurated his career as an art critic with his 1950 essay “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” in which he argued that Tamayo’s “ancient modernity” had resolved the failed project of Mexican muralism.124 The failures of Mexican muralism were identical to the failures Paz ascribed to the Mexican Revolution in The Labyrinth of Solitude: a recognition of the nation’s “true self ” without the ability to articulate a vision of modernity that could overcome its historical wounds. Likewise, those who planned the National Anthropology Museum viewed Tamayo as the embodiment of the nation’s ability to solve the Indian problem through governmental initiatives to assimilate indigenous peoples into modern society without sacrificing their cultural ties to the impressive civilizations of Mesoamerica. Tamayo, a poor child of Zapotec heritage, had received free art education through the public art instruction spearheaded by Vasconcelos and Adolfo Best Maugard. From this lowly state he had achieved international stature as one of Mexico’s most accomplished modern artists. While Tamayo criticized the postrevolutionary cultural project for its patronizing and parochial

indigenismo, he nonetheless allowed others to exploit his racial status when it proved advantageous to his career.125 Capitalizing on Tamayo’s fame, nationally and internationally, technocrats at the National Anthropology Museum recognized that he was the best representative of their claims for an indigenized Mexican modernity. By 1964, Tamayo, a “full-­blooded” Indian internationally hailed as the nation’s greatest modern artist, paradoxically embodied Mexican modernity conceived of as both a product of science and a reunifying fertility myth. Tamayo thus was the key to the convergence of interest between advocates and opponents of an official culture.

The Apotheosis of México-­Tenochtitlán The Olympics and Tlatelolco Tamayo’s “being” lent ballast to the claims of the state in the buildup to the xix Olympiad. The Cultural Olympiad, also orchestrated by Ramírez Vázquez, merely reiterated the ideological claims built into the National Anthropology Museum. Eric Zolov has mapped the discursive terrain of the Cultural Olympiad and identified five components: the iconic use of the peace dove to establish Mexico as an international peacemaker; the development of an op-­art logo that conveyed a “cosmopolitan, ‘forward looking’ sensibility”; the presence of women as emblems of Mexico’s “modern” values and progressive gender relations; the staging of “folkloric performances . . . to highlight Mexico’s cultural ‘authenticity’”; and the use of bright colors to fashion Mexico as a “festive and exotic land.”126 “Together,” writes Zolov, these discursive components “comprised a vision of Mexico in which the nation was perceived as a land where, on one hand, international traditions

demonstrated profound tolerance of political difference while, on the other, indigenous cultural traditions were framed by and interfaced seamlessly with a forward looking embrace of modern values.”127 The museum would serve as an important demonstration of these discursive claims. Lance Wyman and Peter Murdoch, who devised the winning design for the official logo of the games, visited the museum for inspiration, eventually taking their cue from Mathias Goeritz’s ixtle “murals” in the Huichol galleries.128 These two graphic designers created a logo that partook of the contemporary op-­art trend (the antithesis of Goeritz’s emotional art), while also slyly indexing Huichol fiber arts (figure 50). They then branded the Olympics with this logo and designed mod minidresses for the “hostesses” of the games to wear as identifying markers of their official role as guides as well as emblems of Mexico’s progressive gender relations. Likewise, the government staged the opening ceremonies at Teotihuacán and designated Norma Enriqueta Basilio to carry the Olympic torch up the stairs of the Pyramid of the Sun to light a gigantic cauldron fashioned in the guise of Mesoamerican oil lamps. The torch had retraced Cortés’s journey from Spain to the New World to arrive in Mexico in time for the opening ceremonies, which were scheduled to coincide with the ancient ritual celebration of “New Fire.” Thus the ceremonies bizarrely reiterated the course of the conquest but sought to resignify this event through the nationalist and modern recuperation of an indigenous rite, with a modern mestiza athlete completing the journey.129 While wildly successful in turning foreign skepticism about a third-­world Olympics into enthusiasm for the Mexican games, the claims about Mexico’s respect for human rights and

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50 Olympic logo for Mexico City Olympics, designed by Lance Wyman and Peter Murdoch

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political tolerance were severely damaged in the months ­preceding the opening ceremonies. Beginning in late July of 1968, a series of skirmishes between police and students at Mexico’s technical schools led to a peaceful demonstration in which the students and teachers affiliated with the National Federation of Technical Students (Federacíon Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos) marched to the Zócalo to protest police violence.130 This march coincided with a demonstration by students and administrators from the unam organized to protest United States involvement in Vietnam and to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks. Approximately 5,000 protestors from the two groups converged on the Zócalo, prompting a violent response from the granaderos (a special anti-­riot police unit). As the conflict between students and the police escalated in the following days, leftist intellectuals and middle-­class students and administrators aligned themselves with the working-­class students and the various labor leaders imprisoned after the wildcat strikes of the late 1950s. By August, a highly organized National Strike Council (Consejo Nacional de Huelga [cnh]) had formed. In addition to bridging the various class, gender, and racial differences of its constituents, the cnh also mounted an effective publicity campaign in the streets and the press.131 Throughout August and September, the cnh organized a series of peaceful marches culminating in the Great Silent Demonstration of 13 September 1968, in which 400,000 to 500,000 people drawn from all sectors of Mexican society, participated. The trajectory of the silent march was deliberately orchestrated to pass through the most charged symbolic spaces of the capital city. Beginning at the unam, protestors proceeded to Chapultepec Park—location of both the national history and anthropology museums—then along

the Avenida Reforma toward the Alameda— where the Palace of Fine Arts is located—and finally ending at the Zócalo. Elaine Carey notes that through their silent occupation of these public spaces, the students symbolically reclaimed them.132 And in a direct affront to the gendered order of the official public sphere, the organizers selected Roberta “la Tita” Avendaño to address the crowd of thousands gathered in the Zócalo to explain the CNH’s “Six-­Point Petition.”133 While the government was eager to demonstrate the equality and modernity of Mexican women through its Olympic ceremonies, a traditional gendered division of labor and spheres still predominated not only within the state apparatus but also in Mexican society at large. Women had made gains as part of the mobilization of youths within the student movement, but their ability to participate as equals was routinely stymied by the prejudiced attitudes of the male leadership and the patriarchal structures of their own families. Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen have demonstrated that despite these barriers, women did participate in both conventional capacities—as cooks and secretaries—and more radical activities—such as leafleting, street propagandizing, and organizing clandestine meetings—especially within the all-­female brigades.134 Thus, while imperfect, the student movement represented an important opening for women as political actors and historical agents within the generational revolt against the patriarchal structure of the Revolutionary Family. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s administration endeavored to counter the protest movement by portraying the students as anti-­patriotic communists, and it employed increasingly repressive measures to infiltrate and quash the cnh. Carey argues that the government attempted to reclaim its authority through satirical political cartoons published in government-­friendly newspapers that represented

the president as a benevolent patriarch disciplining his errant “sons” within the movement.135 Students responded by depicting Díaz Ordaz and his henchmen as vampires and gorillas menacing an innocent population. Students also took aim at the state rhetoric around the Cultural Olympiad by appropriating its “brand” and redeploying it in ironic and critical ways. For example, in one protest poster, they depicted a bloody bayonet piercing the dove of peace. In another, they emblazoned a government tank with Wyman’s op-­ art logo. The visual art brigades mined Mexico’s rich history of political art to craft aesthetically sophisticated and effective propaganda. Using a variety of printmaking techniques and modern mimeograph machines at the unam, they could design images quickly and make many copies for easy circulation throughout the city. In addition to contemporary popular illustrators, many young art students executed posters for the movement.136 Several of their designs mimicked the handcrafted labor of the graphic print tradition, whether citing José Guadalupe Posada’s calaveras (skeletons) or the social realist style of artists working in the tgp like Leopoldo Méndez. Other posters drew liberally from the expressionist print tradition best represented by José Clemente Orozco’s satirical images of the Mexican Revolution. Likewise, several quotations from murals appear, such as the vicious dog accompanying Cortés in Siqueiros’s The Torture of Cuauhtémoc (figure 11). In one particularly interesting poster, the artist appropriated both Gods of the Modern World, one of the culminating panels from Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization (1932–33) mural cycle at Dartmouth College, and José Guadalupe Posada’s famous calavera of a soldadera (figure 51). In Orozco’s original, we see skeletal academics presiding over a cadaverous female lying atop a pile of steely-­gray books giving “birth” to fetal skeleThe Womb of the Patria  169

51 Poster from the student movement

tons, representing the matriculation of students. Orozco’s intent had been to indict institutionalized education for the perpetuation of “dead knowledge.” In the student poster, the academics have been replaced by heavily armed members of Díaz Ordaz’s administration. They are labeled “aggressors against the Mexican people” and identified by name: the chiefs of police general Luis Cueto Ramírez, Raúl Mendiolea, and Armando Frías; the regent of Mexico City, Alfonso Corona del Rosal; and the minister of the Interior, Luís Echeverría. Instead of a dead mother splayed on her back, we see a young woman, identifiable by her ruffled skirt and high-­heeled boots, lying on her stomach atop a pile of disregarded constitutional articles: Article 19, forbidding federal aggression against journalists; Article 29, which grants the president the right to suspend general privileges during a time of political crises, but not for specific individuals only; Article 9, which grants the right to peaceful public assembly; Article 7, which grants the right to free ex170   The Womb of the Patria

pression; Article 14, which grants the right to due process; and Article 110, which stipulates that high officials are not granted constitutional immunity when they commit crimes. With her gun belt and rifle, this figure recalls Posada’s image of a soldadera published in the popular penny presses during the early phase of the Mexican Revolution. However, she also indexes the “modern” woman being promoted as part of the Cultural Olympiad, as her ruffled skirt and knee-­high boots can also be read as the miniskirts and go-­go boots then fashionable and worn by the games’ official hostesses. The imminent threat implied by the image is one of sexual violation. Thus the diminutive female student portrays both the “rape” of the postrevolutionary constitution and the basic rights enshrined therein and the vulnerability of the student activists at the hands of an amoral and vicious administration operating outside the law. By targeting the average Mexican’s desire to protect women, the artist attempted to shift the threat of the street

(i.e., women’s participation in the movement) to the menace of state violence. In so doing, he both recapitulated the patriarchal rhetoric of the state (the male’s prerogative to protect “his” women and children) and turned it against itself. On 19 September, government forces invaded the unam, and six days later they invaded and occupied secondary campuses throughout the city. On 1 October they withdrew from the unam, but not the polytechnic schools, prompting student leaders to call a meeting in the main plaza of the Tlatelolco housing project on 2 October. Between 5,000 and 10,000 showed up for the meeting, many of them residents and curious onlookers. Toward the end of the meeting, army troops filed into the plaza, blocked the exits, and began firing on the unarmed civilians in what is now widely viewed as a state-­coordinated attack on the growing protest movement. The death count varies depending upon the source; however, journalists who witnessed the event estimated that 200 people were killed, while many more were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. In hindsight, it is clear that the government’s violent reaction was the product of numerous factors: fears that Mexico’s protest movement would approximate those in Paris, Berlin, and the United States; a desperate response to the economic downturn and the threat this posed to the stability of the ruling party; an ongoing attempt to quash the Left, particularly in light of popular sympathies for Fidel Castro’s Cuba; and, last but not least, a desire to preserve the appearance of a developed, harmonious, and exemplary nation in the days leading up to the opening ceremonies of the xix Olympiad. Fearing the disruption of the games, and thereby Mexico’s bid for first-­world modernity, the Díaz Ordaz administration authorized a violent end to the student movement. While there was international outrage, especially on the part of leftist groups and journalists who

witnessed or received firsthand accounts of the massacre, the games went on as scheduled, and ultimately the state’s violence was overshadowed by a series of Olympic scandals, not the least of which was the black-­fisted salute of the track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the gold-­ medal stand during the playing of the national anthem of the United States. The social unrest of 1968 affected not only the nation’s youth but also the art world. In August and September of 1968, artists carried out an action on the unam campus in support of the student movement. This action, while collective, took its direction from José Luis Cuevas’s ephemeral mural projects. The unam ephemeral mural was painted on the corrugated steel wall erected around a statue of former president Miguel Alemán that had been damaged in a 1965 protest on campus. Whereas Cuevas’s prior projects were executed by him alone, as part of his agitation against the cactus curtain, this one was collaboratively produced by Cuevas, Roberto Donís, Francisco Icaza, Jorge Manuel, Benito Messeguer, Adolfo Mexiac, Mario Orozco Rivera, Ricardo Rocha, Fanny Rabel, Guillermo Meza, and Manuel Felguérez, among others.137 This list of participants reveals that artists closely aligned with the Mexican school such as Mexiac and Orozco Romero worked side by side with those associated with the Ruptura. The resultant work was a collage of diverse styles and modes of critique rather than a coherent aesthetic statement. Its purpose was not to make a permanent work of art. Rather, the artists endeavored to visualize collective action and to give broad artistic support to the student ­movement. At the same time as the unam action, artists participating in an exhibition called Work ’68 at the Salon of Mexican Plastic Arts demonstrated their support for the students by turning their paintings toward the wall as protest against the state’s attempts to suppress freedom of exThe Womb of the Patria  171

pression.138 Some signed a statement proclaiming, “We Support the Students,” while others inscribed the backs of their works with words of protest.139 It is important to note that when working in a public space, artists chose the mural form to make their statement, even if it would only be ephemeral, while those working in a commercial, and therefore private, space, opted to disrupt the exhibition (and presumably the sale) of their work as a sign of protest. Both instances reveal that the cactus curtain—or federal control over Mexican art—was waning, if not irrevocably sundered. This later impulse to link protest against the state with strategies to evade the market resonated with the growing critique within the international art world of the politicization and capitalization of art through the biennial system.140 In Mexico, this would take the form of the Salón Independiente, an experiment in collective exhibition that emerged in opposition to the government control of contemporary art exhibitions through the salons and biennials orchestrated by inba and, in particular, the Solar Exposition planned as part of the Cultural Olympiad. While its origin lay in the protest of thirty-­five artists including Tamayo, Carlos Mérida, Carrington, Cuevas, Coronel, and Gunther Gerzso, ultimately, several of these figures dropped out of the association, as much because of their already established success as individual artists as because of their discomfort with the anti-­individualism and anti-­market stance of the group.141 Many artists participated in the first and subsequent salons, and some of its most important players were women artists such as Helen Escobedo, Marta Palau, and Lilia Carrillo as well as foreign-­born artists like Kazuya Sakai, Felipe Ehrenberg, and Brian Nissen. The first Salón Independiente was held (coincidentally) two weeks after the massacre, and while it made no overt references to the events of 2 October, the values proclaimed in its decla172   The Womb of the Patria

ration reflect a nascent form of institutional critique that was catalyzed in reaction to an overtly authoritarian state.142 The declaration proclaimed: 1. Through freedom of expression, it is our purpose . . . to conduct a continuous search for new forms that relate art to a society in evolution, opposing outdated criteria that restrict the development of aesthetic creation. 2. The salon is independent from any official or private institution, yet does not exclude collaborations with persons or organizations, as long as these collaborations do not affect the salon’s character; the salon has no political or profit-­oriented goals. 3. This salon is international, because of the different nationalities of its founding members, and also because it seeks to promote interchange and collaboration with artists from other countries.143

The Salón Independiente was short-lived. The group split in 1971 as a result of tensions between their founding convictions and the desires of individual members of the collective to participate in biennials, collaborate with the state’s cultural apparatus, and engage in overtly political acts. While the Salón did not last, it represents a renewed commitment to collective endeavor in Mexican art that strengthened over the 1970s. As these various protests reveal, by the 1970s, the state’s control over Mexican culture was challenged at every front. Unlike during the golden age, the president no longer presided like a benevolent patriarch over the Revolutionary Family. Students were appropriating the social realist aesthetic of official culture in order to critique the state. And contemporary artists, even those who had happily participated in the government’s marquee project, the National Anthropology Museum, were engaged in public attacks on the state’s cultural apparatus. The postrevolutionary national

culture project had splintered into myriad experimental tendencies that were forging new articulations of aesthetics and politics, from the itinerant grupos and conceptual artists to experiments in geometric art and pop psychedelia. Unlike the period from 1930 through 1965, when Mexican muralism could be hailed as a distinctly Mexican contribution to the international avant-­garde, by the 1970s, the pluralized cultural landscape in Mexico was very similar to what one would find in any Western nation during the second half of the twentieth century.

Museology as Sorcery: Paz’s Postdata If an international boycott of the Olympics was not forthcoming, the effect of the massacre at Tlatelolco on Mexico’s domestic landscape was immediate. The general population remained traumatized by the open display of state violence, leading to the end of the student movement and an escapist counterculture that moved slowly away from organized politics.144 However, intellectuals and artists responded with outrage, condemning the ruling party, its claim to represent the people’s revolution, and its entire cultural apparatus. This event would convert the periodic criticism of the postrevolutionary state’s national culture project into a sustained critique of official culture defined as such. And Octavio Paz’s Postdata is one of the first and most prescient articulations of this critical discourse. Postdata began as a public lecture that Paz delivered at the University of Texas at Austin on 30 October 1969, approximately one year after the deadly events at the Tlatelolco housing projects. The following summer he revised his notes and published the lecture as a full-­length essay. The text was translated into English in 1970 and is currently

known by the title “The Other Mexico.” The essay is broken into three long chapters, with a prefatory note in which Paz endeavors to clarify the argument he put forth nearly twenty years earlier in The Labyrinth of Solitude in order to link his current remarks to what he claims has been a career-­ long project of criticism—and self-­criticism—not a study of the psychology or ontology of the Mexican character. Responding to the reception of his earlier essay from the vantage of 1969, he argues that The Labyrinth of Solitude was an attempt to explain what was behind the “mask” of the “Mexican character.”145 The “Mexican character,” he asserts, is not an essence but a cultural ideology. With his prefatory note, Paz foreshadows the critique of national culture that he elaborates throughout Postdata while simultaneously positioning his prior work as an earlier attempt to deconstruct the cultural dynamics of official culture. In chapter 1, “Olympics and Tlatelolco,” Paz begins with an evaluation of the student upheavals throughout the West in 1968 so as to distinguish Mexico’s student movement from others. Paz insists that, unlike those in France or the United States, Mexico’s student movement was neither radical nor revolutionary. Rather, it was a very reasonable request for reform of the political structure and in particular the ruling party. Viewing the student movement as a sign of development, not its absence, Paz argues that the anomaly of Mexico’s 1968 was not the resurgence of protest culture but rather the government’s violent reaction to it. Paz attributes this reaction to “an instinctive repetition that took the form of an expiatory ritual.” This repetition is the eternal return of Mexico’s “buried past,” in particular the ritualized violence that structured the Aztec world.146 Thus Paz asserts that the paradoxical coexistence of the “Olympics and Tlatelolco”—modernity and barbarism—follows from the particular nature of the postrevolutionary state and ruling party. The Womb of the Patria  173

In chapter 2, “Development and Other Mirages,” Paz tracks the economic hardships facing the nation after the Mexican Revolution in order to situate the emergence of the pri as a pragmatic response to underdevelopment. While Paz maintains that “all such revolutions [i.e., those spurred by underdevelopment], from the Russian to the Mexican . . . , degenerate into bureaucratic regimes that are more or less paternalistic and oppressive,” he insists that the “distinctive feature of the Mexican situation is the existence of a political bureaucracy set up in a state party and composed of specialists in the manipulation of the masses.”147 He likens the pri, and its hierarchical bureaucracy, to a pyramid, thereby introducing the central trope of chapter 3. Titled “Critique of the Pyramid,” Paz’s final chapter is concerned not with the PRI’s secret military police or the failures of the Mexican Miracle but rather with what he calls the “two Mexicos.”148 Paz uses this phrase to speak, at once, of developed and underdeveloped Mexico, the dynamic of self and “other” that structures mestizo national identity, and the coexistence of a modern Mexico with the atavistic impulses that find their contemporary expression not only in state violence but also in the fetishization of the Aztecs at the National Anthropology Museum. Reminding the reader that the modern capital is located on top of “México-­Tenochtitlán, the seat of Aztec power,” Paz argues that “the thread of domination” that characterized both the Aztec and Spanish empires has “never been broken.”149 Note that in The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz equated Aztec culture with the Indian mother and argued that the modern Mexican’s bond with his maternal cultural origins had been definitively ruptured by the conquest and then independence. However, now, in the aftermath of state violence, he no longer speaks of returning to a nurturing indigenous womb, but rather he re174   The Womb of the Patria

constitutes the indigenized “other” as a perennial threat. Arguing that ritual sacrifice and colonial brutality were never overcome by modern republicanism, Paz asserts that the modern nation-­ state is continuous with “the thread of domination” that links Mexico’s indigenous past with its mestizo present. In this reversal, Paz does exactly what he condemned the modern Mexican (man) for doing in The Labyrinth of Solitude: he repudiates the “other” and seeks a “withdrawal” from the denigrated Indian mother. Only now she is reconfigured from the ever-­suffering, violated, and passive figure of Malinche into the vengeful and barbaric Coatlicue. As in The Labyrinth of Solitude, in Postdata Paz never acknowledges the problematic gendered allegory at the heart of his attempts to imagine the mestizo nation and its troubled modern subject. After an excursus on the militaristic ­imaginary and ritual structure of Aztec society, Paz focuses on the use of sorcery and sacrificial rites to maintain its centralized and authoritarian power. In a surprising turn, he shifts his discussion to the contemporary National Anthropology Museum and likens the ritualized mythmaking of its displays to the Aztecs’ use of spectacle and violence to cow its conquered subjects. “Why,” he asks rhetorically, “have we sought Mexico’s archetype among [the] . . . Aztec and not Mayan or Zapotec or Tarascan or Otomí?”150 The museum’s “exaltation of the Aztec period,” he answers, “confirms and justifies what in appearance condemns the museum: the survival, the continuing strength, of the Aztec model of domination in our contemporary history.”151 Through his reading of the museum, Paz crafts the modern state as a hierarchical political regime that deliberately replicates the ritual structure of Aztec power and its recourse to sorcery—here understood as the dramatic effects of the displays orchestrated by Ramírez Vázquez—to perpetuate its authoritarian control of the ­populace.

Paz’s reading of the museum’s architecture and exhibitions is a model of deconstructive ideology critique. He recognizes that the “column” (which he incorrectly identifies as being made of stone) supporting the “parasol” is “covered with reliefs that repeat the themes of the official rhetoric” and that in the museum, “anthropology and history have been made to serve an idea about Mexico’s history” that “sustains our conception of the state, of political power, and of social order.”152 If in 1951 indigenous survival as culture, heritage, or spirit was evidence of Mexico’s imminent modernity—the “seed of death in life”—by 1969, it was a sign of the nation’s perpetual tendency toward political barbarism. And the National Anthropology Museum stands, therefore, as the apotheosis-­apocalypse of the postrevolutionary project to revalue the Indian in the interest of mestizo modernity. It is both its ultimate expression and the emblem of its fatal flaws and, with it, the failure of muralism as a technique or device for social revolution. But if Paz’s insights into the ideological nature of the museum’s architecture and displays appears prescient given our contemporary understanding of the agency of exhibition, his text reveals troubling blind spots when it comes to critically examining the primitivist logic of the Indo-­American Gothic that he had helped to promote or the artists associated with its ascent. Even as Paz critiques official indigenismo at the museum, he continues to evoke and thus blame the other Mexico for the failures of Mexican modernity. While not explicit in his slippery argument, this other Mexico is simultaneously the barbarous Aztec past and the contemporary underclass. He blames the pri for exacerbating the divide between the two Mexicos, and yet he nonetheless conjures the racialized figure of “deep Mexico” to emblematize the nation’s failed modernity. Yet another iteration of the Indo-­American Gothic, Paz’s argument in

Postdata was ultimately incapable of deconstructing his own role in the Janus-­faced discourses of indigenismo that he sought to unmask. What is more, Paz actually praises his cadre of writers and the politically agnostic art of the postwar generation that he promoted as the only real critics of the postrevolutionary regime, and therefore the very moral wellspring of Postdata. Arguing that these artists and writers directed their criticism at a “showy nationalism and an art of patriotic or revolutionary slogans,” Paz asserts that they “[set] art free” and in so doing established the conditions for a “wider freedom.” Their criticism, he avows, is neither “direct” nor “explicit.”153 Rather it is “exploratory,” “visionary,” “obsessed with double images of daily marvels and banalities, of humor and passion.”154 Paz’s description here could easily characterize the work of artists associated with la Ruptura such as Rafael Coronel or Leonora Carrington’s surrealist-­inspired reveries. Paz praises this art precisely because it eschews any direct engagement with politics. Nonetheless, he claims that it strikes horror within the “regime’s hierarchs,” for it reveals that the “modernity in which [they] believe is not modern any longer.” By this he means that the aesthetic positions of the artists he supports reveal that the Mexican school pioneered by Mexican muralists and preferred by the postrevolutionary state had become retardetaire. With this rupture between artists and the state, he concludes: “The long-­kept truce between the intellectuals and those in power, a truce initiated by the Revolution and prolonged by the necessities (the mirage) of development, has now ended. Mexican culture has recovered its vocation as a critic of society.”155 Given the foregoing survey of “murals” commissioned for the National Anthropology Museum, one has to wonder how Paz could sustain the claim that the Mexican school was the preThe Womb of the Patria  175

ferred state art. By 1968, the critique of the Mexican school that he had fomented had, in his writing, become an empty gesture, obscuring the many paradoxes of the contemporary cultural and political landscape. Moreover, Paz makes no mention of the new alliances between members of the Mexican school and the artists of la Ruptura currently taking place at the unam or in the Salón Independiente in opposition to the state’s cultural apparatus. Nor does he mention the creative wellspring of graphic art—much of which was inspired ideologically and aesthetically by the Mexican school—that accompanied the student movement. In short, Paz’s desire to maintain the Mexican school as the preeminent emblem of official culture made him blind to the nascent reconfiguration of aesthetics and politics in Mexico after 1968.

The Womb or the Wound of the Patria? The odd trajectory of Paz’s argument reflects the historical complexity and contradiction of how a revolutionary art became official culture. Paz was correct in noting that non-­polemical art was the only self-­evident way to avoid being integrated into the sclerotic state discourses of the postrevolutionary regime. Yet, as this story reveals, the very discrediting of politics in art enabled the conversion of public art into mere institutional ornament rather than the dialectical subversive practice David Alfaro Siqueiros had hoped it could become. Whereas Siqueiros had been cognizant of the pitfalls of primitivism—what he called the “Mexican curio”—from the moment he launched his attack on Rivera, his call for a second phase of mural art failed. It remains an open question if mural art ever could have sustained or effectively performed the 176   The Womb of the Patria

critical role Siqueiros ascribed to it. Nonetheless, the artistic abandonment of institutional critique as an essential component of a public art practice ultimately enabled the complete absorption of aesthetics as politics into the ideological projects of didactic exhibition. The technocratic support of artists associated with Paz’s generation demonstrates not only that social realism was not the only or prevailing idiom favored by the regime but also that “visionary” art could just as readily serve the politics of the regime as overtly political art. Moreover, the troubling blind spots in Paz’s critical writings with regard to the primitive and the feminization of indigenous culture were shared not only by state actors but also by the artists in their employ. Ultimately, the inability of curators, critics, and artists to deconstruct the gender and race politics of Mexico’s powerful national myths obfuscated the centuries-­long struggle to reconcile the historical traumas of conquest and colonization with aspirations for a socially egalitarian mestizo modernity. Despite its blind spots, Postdata marks the emergence of a sustained critique of official culture on the part of intellectuals. In this sense, Paz was right when he wrote that “Mexican culture [had] recovered its vocation as a critic of society.” But he was wrong about how this came to pass and where this critical vocation would express itself. Paz insisted that it was in and through the writing, poetry, essays, and art of la Ruptura that Mexican culture voiced its social critique. I disagree. As this chapter suggests, to the extent that the art of la Ruptura engaged in any form of legible criticism, it merely recapitulated the state’s cultural ideology in a darker—Gothic—register. The official embrace of this generation at the National Anthropology Museum reveals that Siqueiros’s attempt to make institutional critique an essential component of mural art failed. But in the decades following the massacre at Tlatelolco, art historians

and museum curators would take up the mantel of critique and address Paz’s blind spots through a deconstructive curatorial practice taking official culture as its object. This would come to pass, in part, as a consequence of the democratizing impulse that followed the massacre, an impulse spearheaded as much by women who had been mobilized by their involvement in the student movement as by men. Today, the National Anthropology Museum, while still wildly popular and endlessly spectacular, is not a womb but rather a wound. It is a chronic reminder of historical traumas that cannot be overcome or redeemed by the myths of nationalism. The museum has become the most criticized institution within the state’s vast cultural apparatus. It stands as a testament to a hopeful time in Mexico’s recent history and as a reminder of the nation’s perennial inability to achieve first-­world status. In the end, it is neither political institutions such as the postrevolutionary ruling party nor the economy—the so-­called Mexican Miracle—but rather culture that places Mexico among the nations of the first world. And in this respect, her museums and mural art remain the international calling cards that state actors from Calles and Gamboa through López Mateos and Ramírez Vázquez hoped they would be. But as the foregoing chap-

ter argues, this reached a critical threshold in 1965. Today, the great cultural projects of the postrevolutionary state (the Palace, National History Museum, National Anthropology Museum, unam, etc.) are artifacts, part of the vast museumification of the capital city. They remain major tourist destinations, functional heritage sites, and symbolically loaded icons of official culture. However, they are also increasingly the location of political struggles over culture or new experiments in museology. Much of the work that goes on in these institutions today is characterized by a critical curatorial ethos that takes into consideration this history in the orchestration of new exhibitions. Art museums—including the Palace of Fine Arts— have been more successful than history and anthropology museums in redesigning exhibitions in order to foster a critical understanding of official culture or to create the kind of citizen-­subject Siqueiros imagined. The concluding chapter argues that the legacy of the revolutionary culture instantiated in and through mural art can be discerned not in public art projects or the community mural practice that continues to this day but rather in the reflexive curatorial strategies that bring institutional critique to bear on Mexican art and museology.

The Womb of the Patria  177

Conclusion We must oppose the Mexico of the Zócalo, Tlatelolco, and the Museum of Anthropology, not with another image—all images have a fatal tendency to become petrified—but with criticism, the acid that dissolves images.  Octavio Paz

To conclude this study of how a revolutionary art became official culture, I once again invoke Octavio Paz’s critique of the postrevolutionary state’s national culture project. As Paz claims, the ruling party’s manipulation and symbolic appropriation of imperial Aztec culture is what links the Zócalo, Tlatelolco, and the National Anthropology Museum. His reference to images recalls the central role of mural art, and the realist idiom in particular, in articulating an ideologically powerful vision of popular nationalism rooted in indigenous culture to the “peculiarities of the state.” Whereas David Alfaro Siqueiros argued consistently for a mural-­based alternative to the “Mexican curio” instantiated by Rivera and embraced by postrevolutionary museum practitioners, Paz insists that “all images have a fatal tendency to become petrified.” The fate of Siqueiros’s murals at the National History Museum suggests that Paz was right. Thus, despite the internal quarrel among mural artists and Siqueiros’s attempts to forge a dynamic mural practice capable of institutional critique, the power of cultural institutions, and museums in particular, to overdetermine—indeed to “petrify”—this revolutionary art prevailed.

Yet as the foregoing chapters demonstrate, it was not the institutionalizing power of museums alone that facilitated mural art’s slow shift away from engaged politics and institutional critique and toward modernist ornament. It was also the paradoxical effects of the critique of muralism and social realism on the part of artists and intellectuals in Mexico as well as cultural cold warriors without. In their sublimation of politics in aesthetics and their mythologizing approach to history, Tamayo and Paz helped to discredit socially engaged art in a way similar to that of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in the United States. Their critique was at once an ethical objection to the paternalist politics of the postrevolutionary state or, in Paz’s words, the “philanthropic ogre.” But at the same time, by severing art from the material concerns of history and politics, they enabled its conversion into a fetishistic emblem of mexicanidad. Moreover, neither the artist nor the essayist was able to think beyond a nationalist framework. Thus while they attempted to convert the nation’s traumatic history into a fertility myth, their vision of mestizo modernity was deeply invested in the masculinist imaginary of the fed-

eral government, its cultural technocrats, and the Mexican school they so disdained. This, paradoxically, served the interests of the modernizing state better than the leftist agitations of Rivera and Siqueiros or even the painted didactics of an O’Gorman or Camarena. It facilitated federal attempts to maintain conventional race and gender relations through an essentially assimilative and patriarchal conception of mestizaje. And with the advent of an art that no longer appeared political or wedded to the socialist politics of the Mexican school, the government could position itself as thoroughly modern and invested in the kind of cultural “freedoms” that characterized the free-­market approach to culture in the United States. Thereby the Mexican state could maintain its role as patron of national culture without appearing repressive, like the Soviet state. In the epigraph, Paz suggests that only the “acid” of criticism could begin the process of effacing the image of Mexico calcified through the official cultural projects of the postrevolutionary state. Paz refers here to his own literary and cultural criticism and to the art of his peers of the Ruptura generation, who, like Cuevas, “[set] art free” from the Mexican state.1 As I have argued throughout this book, the aestheticization or wholesale renunciation of politics in the work of these artists was not only inadequate as an “acid” but also inadvertently complicit with the very state project it sought to expose. Cuevas’s Ephemeral Mural No. 1 of 1967 (discussed in chapter 1) demonstrates precisely the difficulties with “acid” as a mode of critique. And here I invoke both the material properties of acid as a corrosive liquid that literally destroys what it touches and its figurative associations with a kind of humor that traffics in a dyspeptic sarcasm. Cuevas’s Ephemeral Mural No. 1 embodies both senses of the term in its parodic erasure of muralism and in its cynical denigration of politics in art. 180   Conclusion

Recall that Cuevas purchased a billboard in one of Mexico’s tourist districts and installed a large “mural” that would be destroyed in thirty days (the period of advertising time he had purchased). The mural consisted of his self-­portrait, his signature, and a frieze of grotesque figures representing the victims of nuclear holocaust and occupying a surface area derived from the measurements of Picasso’s Guernica. In interviews, Cuevas argued that the target of his critique was Siqueiros, “Mexico’s most famous and richest Communist.”2 At that moment, Siqueiros was completing his final mural, the March of Humanity, a colossal sculpted painting that covers the walls and ceiling of the upper floor of the Polyforum Siqueiros, a cultural center located on the Parque de la Lama in Mexico City. The Polyforum Siqueiros was commissioned and paid for by Manuel Suárez, a cement manufacturer and real estate millionaire working in concert with the federal government to develop a tourist and conference center for the 1968 Olympic Games in a remote neighborhood along the Avenida Insurgentes.3 Siqueiros began work on the project in 1967 but did not complete it until 1971, when it was inaugurated to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican mural movement. As he had at the National History Museum, Siqueiros created a total painted environment. However, at the Polyforum he erected a rotating platform that moves the viewer physically while sound and light effects highlight the action in the mural. This overblown project betrayed Siqueiros’s commitment to a self-­activating viewer and constituted the viewing subject as a passive witness to a multimedia spectacle. Moreover, the enormous cost of the project, paid for with private moneys, and its location in a tourist destination (with an entrance fee) repudiated mural art’s commitment to socializing artistic expression.

With Siqueiros’s project in mind, Cuevas drew an analogy between advertising (the billboard) and state propaganda (mural art depicting themes of human struggle) and characterized privatized federal patronage as a form of international marketing. Just as Cuevas markets his mural to tourists at the intersection of Londres and Genova streets, the government promotes revolutionary clichés to an international audience to sell a stereotypical nationalism that is familiar in its quaint, folkloric imagery and thus easy for “tourists who like to take a little revolution with them to their safe homes” to consume.4 Cuevas sought to counter “folklore art” by eschewing bright colors, avoiding “revolutionary themes,” and above all refusing the romantic humanism Siqueiros had embraced late in his career. In fact, Cuevas refused any kind of commitment in his art and displayed a deep pessimism about the plight of modern man. To wit, he championed the kind of transnational popular culture that official culture sought to police while sarcastically invoking Picasso and the broad international themes (nuclear holocaust) that characterize Modern Man primitivism. For instance, he painted a football player to represent aggression and hired go-­go dancers to perform at the mural’s unveiling, invoking Hollywood as the model for his spectacle. He stated that his goal for the ephemeral mural series was to erect a self-­portrait in neon light in New York’s Times Square. In every sense he thumbed his nose at the protectionist nationalism of official culture while refusing to offer an alternative. His solution was an aesthetics of negation. But Cuevas’s mural is full of (perhaps) unintended ironies that point toward the cynical impasse of this kind of critique while also prescient in its anticipation of privatization as the paradoxical mode of “reforming” the Mexican social welfare state. By sarcastically embracing a commercial venue—the billboard—Cuevas called at-

tention to the absence of any public space outside the institutions of the state. But if the only alternatives to federal institutions are the commercialized spaces of private capital, and if the only alternative to the citizen-­subject imagined by muralists is a bourgeois consumer, what has become of cultural politics? Like Paz, Cuevas eschewed state patronage. However, his embrace of both hermetic aesthetics and the private sector as the sphere for a performative politics of pessimism left no room for a productive alternative to the political crisis of public art. Moreover, it abandoned altogether the social ethos instantiated by mural artists in their manifesto. In what follows, I argue that the legacy of the politicized cultural ethos first hailed by the muralists in 1923 can be discerned not in the provocations of a market-­based avant-­garde but rather in the very heart of the “philanthropic ogre” in contemporary museum practice. And this too has been the consequence of the contingent effects of an authoritarian state seeking to maintain its political control, internal and external pressure for cultural democracy and economic reform, and the response of local intellectuals mobilized by the radical experience of the 1968 student movement. Following the massacre at Tlatelolco, Luís Echeverría (1970–76), Díaz Ordaz’s minister of the interior, came to power on a neo-­populist platform designed to distance his sexenio from the authoritarian style and abuses of the previous regime. Scholars have demonstrated conclusively that while Echeverría’s policies were effective in regaining popular support for the pri after the crisis of 1968, he reformed the state in name only.5 For example, he offered amnesty to political prisoners, both from the student movement and the labor leaders imprisoned during the 1950s but engaged in a covert dirty war to repress the remaining political opposition. However, many of Conclusion  181

his neo-­populist concessions to the intellectual Left had unintended long-­term consequences for a democratic opening of the government’s cultural bureaucracy as well as the development of a robust movement to foster civil society as a check on state power and an alternative to federal patronage. Further, his attempt to enfranchise oppositional factions, especially students politicized by the movement, by offering them government positions, resulted in the placement of often progressive and leftist individuals in leadership positions in the state’s ministries and museums. The consequences of this paradoxical opening are ongoing and highly debated. Nonetheless, I insist they have profoundly altered the relationship between art, politics, and the museum in contemporary Mexico.

Cultural Politics and the “Philanthropic Ogre” in Mexico after 1968 The critical museology that emerged as a consequence of the political crisis of 1968 has married the institutional critique implicit in Siqueiros’s mural art with the ideological critique of didactic exhibition set in motion by Paz’s Postdata. This curatorial school is rooted in the socialist ethos of the muralists, as expressed in their desire to “make art a weapon for social change,” while also dedicated to exposing the ways that mural art participated in the “creation of an ensemble of myths about Mexican identity” that, according to Roger Bartra’s argument, helped to establish “a structural relationship between the nature of culture and the peculiarities of the state.”6 In this sense, contemporary museology is a variant of didactic exhibition; however, rather than endeavoring to uphold the claims of official culture, it seeks to unmask its symbolic and political operations. That this cura182   Conclusion

torial practice has found the art museum to be its most successful forum speaks to both the legacy of the muralists’ politicization of art as a terrain of ideological struggle and to the postrevolutionary state’s attempts to make art a technique of social governance. As Paz pointed out, the National Anthropology Museum marked the “apotheosis-­ apocalypse of México-­Tenochtitlán.” It was at once the apex of Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural project and the first museum to come under scrutiny when intellectuals began to investigate the relationship between the museum and its public under the demagogic rule of a one-­party system. Along with their critique of the totalitarian elements of the ruling party’s hold on political power, intellectuals and activists turned their attention to the hegemonic aspects of its public institutions.7 Rather than representing the people, public museums were accused of demanding that their patrons, in the words of Néstor García Canclini, “convert yourself into what you are.”8 In what follows, I map a historically related constellation of cultural projects undertaken by technocrats and leftist intellectuals in the wake of the political crisis of the state. These projects point to a more complex history yet to be told of how official culture was, if not revolutionized, reclaimed for more radical social and political ends through a critical museum practice.

Museologic Centralism and Cultural Hegemony Following the 1968 crisis, an increased awareness of the cultural hegemony of federal institutions accompanied growing concerns about the power of the postrevolutionary state and its ability to enforce a homogenizing vision of industrial modernity on a people who remained deeply stratified

along lines of class and race. Additionally, the celebration of the Indian through official indigenismo was felt to be ideologically motivated and therefore in the service of the ruling elites. These concerns were given impetus by unesco in 1972, when a Latin American delegation put together a roundtable discussion in Santiago, Chile, to address the problem of “cultural politics” and to put forth resolutions for its constituencies. In Mexico the sep began implementing a new integrated plan throughout its departments from 1977 to 1982. This plan sought to put public culture more firmly in the service of the development of “justice, independence and liberty.” Recognizing the “impossibility of formulating a project of cultural politics based on a single worldview,” the architects of this project spearheaded attempts to develop a broader concept of patrimony that would reflect the multiplicity of Mexico’s populations, traditions, and influences. The plan called for a “democratization” of culture, and this was understood as integral to the project of establishing political democracy.9 A 1985 report published by inah succinctly summarizes the problems and solutions that this initiative identified. Its authors note first and foremost that the national history codified largely in the museums of the nation’s capital had been interpreted through an ethnocentric focus that had “deformed or occulted the regional diversity of the country.”10 These museums had tended to preserve the past, representing it through “precious” objects without establishing a vital connection with the present. Furthermore, this past was presented through linear narratives of progress, a discourse that presents national history more “as a chronological sequence of successes and isolated facts illustrated through artistic objects than as a reflection on the continuities and ruptures of the social and historic formation of Mexico.”11 In opposition to this kind of traditional mu-

seum, the new national program proclaimed: “Today the fact that Mexico is a multiethnic and pluricultural nation with diverse and contradictory regional historical developments is accepted, and this plurality and diversity are what has characterized the historic formation of the Mexican society. At the present time it is necessary that museums divulge this new knowledge, that they propose new solutions that correctly express these phenomena, and that they give rise to the necessity to bridge the gap between the past and the present.”12 The authors of this report argue that these problems stem from the concentration of Mexico’s cultural wealth in Mexico City. Subsequently, they advocate the development of regional museums and a more even distribution of cultural objects throughout the country at large. They attribute the problem to the lack of a developed and general cultural politics for the nation’s museums as well as a lack of resources. As a consequence of this lack, they argue, museums “don’t function as cultural centers dedicated to satisfying the many demands of their social environment, nor do they maintain a solid relation with their cultural environment.”13 The report recommends that the new national plan promote the participation of the public in all museum activities through the development of more regional museums that respond to the specific histories, traditions, and influences of their local environment. The development in Mexico of the regional and community museum over the last three decades is the outcome of this initiative.14 And as I have argued elsewhere, the local and community museum movement has retooled and extended the governmental agenda of the postrevolutionary cultural project.15 However, even as administrators attempt to further the reach of the museum enterprise among Mexico’s many rural and impoverished communities, these institutions are often used by local constituents as a resource Conclusion  183

for making claims against the state or for fostering forms of self-­help in the absence of state welfare or effective social services. This popular turn to culture as a resource, what George Yudicé calls the “expedience of culture,” acquiesces to the techniques and modes of subjectivity created by governmental initiatives but turns them toward ends that address local rather than national concerns.16 At times, local constituencies have mobilized official discourses of culture and identity to enact progressive political agendas, for example, blocking Wal-­Mart’s expansion into Teotihuacán by marshaling international concern for the sanctity of Mexico’s national patrimony.

Whither the Public? Studying Reception If the cultural hegemony of Mexico City had resulted in both a concentration of the nation’s cultural wealth in the capital city and a homogenization of its diversity in the ideological projects of the state, policy makers sought to rectify this not only by pluralizing museums but also by shifting the focus from the national register to the regional or local. However, scholars also began to question the efficacy of museums, especially art museums, for Mexico’s diverse population. Viewing art museums as hegemonic spaces in which the values of an educated elite were confirmed, art historians and sociologists began investigating the populist claims of Mexico’s cultural bureaucrats and institutions. These scholars undertook a series of reception studies to determine not only who the public for Mexico’s museums was but also how effective exhibitions were in communicating with this public. In 1976 the first study of this nature in Mexico was undertaken by the art historian Rita Eder in collaboration with Christine Frérot, Araceli Rico, 184   Conclusion

Patricia Rivadeneyra, Lourdes Romano, Guadalupe Carreón, and Juan Blejer.17 Politicized by the events of 1968 and inspired by The Love of Art, Pierre Bourdieu’s and Alan Darbel’s Marxist analysis of France’s museum public, Eder set out to determine whether or not the “people” so often invoked in institutional rhetoric actually attended art exhibitions in Mexico and, if not, what implications the social makeup of the actual museum-­ going public had for a more radical cultural politics.18 She noted that the Mexican muralists, originally under the direction of José Vasconcelos, had set in motion the “popularization of painting” and thereby created the “phantasm” of a vast “art-­ viewing public.”19 Eder designed a sociological survey that she implemented at a traveling exhibition of European masterpieces from the Armand Hammer Collection of the National Gallery of Art mounted at the Palace of Fine Arts, which experienced record-­ breaking attendance. Eder’s team endeavored to study the “Mexican art-­viewing public, its attitudes and opinions in relation to distinct artistic movements, its conceptualization of art and its possible receptivity to vanguard movements that propose a change in the esthetic experience.”20 Central to this study was the desire to find ways to activate and “liberate” the viewing public from its passivity before art exhibitions and the aesthetic experience. Eder’s repeated arguments about activating the museum-­going audience derive from Siqueiros’s appeals for a mural art that could do the same. Whereas Siqueiros hoped that a cinematographic mural art could motivate and thus liberate an active viewing subject, Eder argues instead for a cultural politics enacted through the public art museum. The resulting data demonstrated that the fine art–viewing public was overwhelmingly comprised of university-­educated young adults. The majority of visitors had learned of the exhibition

through the mass media rather than school programs or friends, and most demonstrated a preference for impressionism and other established genres of Western painting (even over Mexican art, although muralism topped the list of national movements of interest). From this, the team concluded that the fine art audience in Mexico is drawn from the well-­educated upper classes and that this group tends to uncritically accept the hierarchy and high-­art “cult” promoted by Western cultural discourses over the more radical claims for culture articulated by the muralists. Nonetheless, they found that while audiences expressed a desire to see more exhibitions of impressionism, they also expressed enthusiasm for an “art of participation,” suggesting an openness to the contemporary vanguard that could be exploited to cultivate a more active stance in the viewer. They concluded the study with a call for more empirical research into the Mexican art-­viewing public.21 In 1987 a group of Mexican scholars took up Eder’s call and published the results of a broader sociological study of museums and their public called The Public Surveyed. They examined four art exhibitions in Mexico City in order to establish how the public uses these spaces so as to determine how to make them more effective.22 The authors acknowledged that in Latin American countries museums are not conceived of as boring temples of antiquated culture. Nonetheless, they still present knowledge and access barriers to the public at large. Their study showed that the patronage of Mexico’s art museums is overwhelmingly domestic, with foreign tourists making up only 10 percent of those surveyed. Of that domestic audience, 40 percent were students, the majority of that group having reached the university level, 13 percent having attained a secondary degree, and 7 percent having finished only primary school.23 These statistics indicate that education is a de-

cisive factor for attendance in Mexico’s artistic establishments. The second most significant indicator was occupation, with 26 percent of the non-­ student domestic audience drawn from the sectors of professional labor and only 3 percent from technical or specialized work.24 Clearly, education and a white-­collar occupation greatly increase the likelihood that an individual will visit an art museum. The authors concluded that schools and the mass media are the most important sites for generating a broader museum audience. (Fifty-­ two percent of the people surveyed had decided to visit because of radio, television, or newspaper promotions.)25 The art museum in Mexico provides a specialized case, as viewership is significantly higher for the museums of history and anthropology. Attempts to democratize the art audience are complicated as well by the different values that accrue to the objects on display. The surveys showed that the criteria utilized to make aesthetic distinctions or value judgments by those surveyed were heavily indebted to Mexican cultural nationalism. They showed a preference for realism, technical ability, “noble sentiments,” and art that expressed a relation to history.26 As the authors explain, “The criteria of social function, especially those of nationalism and autonomous cultures, that had a strong role in the development of plastic art and, in general, of culture in Mexico appears to have contributed more to the formation of taste and the opinions of the spectators than the conception of the fine arts.”27 In each exhibit much of the intended meaning proposed by the museum staff and the catalogue was missed by the public, and the viewers seemed to valorize less traditionally significant features such as materials over formal qualities.28 The discrepancies between intention and reception led the authors to conclude that museum workers need to better understand their audience in order to better communicate with Conclusion  185

them. (Interestingly, in a later survey discussed in the following pages, García Canclini celebrates the hybridity of viewer response as an important tool against cultural hegemony.)29 The point of these surveys was to demonstrate that the governmental project had succeeded in informing visitor attitudes toward museum display. But they were also undertaken to help museologists interested in a more radical exhibitionary practice better understand the capacities and resistances of this public. Over and over again, scholars expressed a desire to activate the museum public in the face of official culture in addition to democratizing and diversifying audiences. These were the explicit goals of the muralists, especially David Alfaro Siqueiros. And while these surveys demonstrated that the postrevolutionary state was fairly successful in inculcating a popular nationalism, it was less successful in socializing art. Thus the popular audiences that muralists presumed remained a “phantasm” while the actual art-­viewing public presented challenges for a more radical cultural politics.

The National Museum of Art: Retooling Didactic Exhibition At the same time that the critique of museologic centralism was raised in the federal government’s cultural and educational ministries, researchers associated with unam and radicalized by the student movements of the 1960s began to critically investigate the shopworn narrative of Mexican art that credited the transformation of national art to the armed struggle of the revolution, thereby diminishing the accomplishments of the preceding decades. These scholars recognized that by obscuring the contributions of the academy, especially during the nineteenth century, the ruling elite had associated Mexico’s “cultural renais186   Conclusion

sance” with the consolidation of its postrevolutionary regime. The National Art Museum (Museo Nacional de Arte [munal]) came into being in response to these critiques. Spearheaded by Jorge Alberto Manrique, a respected scholar of nineteenth-­ century art, the museum first opened its doors in 1982 with a small exhibition of its permanent collection culled from the archives of the many museums under the purview of inba. In 1986, as part of the fortification of civil society in the aftermath of the 1984 earthquake, the founders gathered together a group of young scholars to revise the permanent installation to reflect the growing sophistication of Mexican art history as well as their enhanced sense of social purpose. Prior to its expansion and reorganization in 2000, the munal was comprised of twenty-­four galleries dispersed across two floors of a former Porfirian monument. Providing a “panoramic vision of Mexican art . . . with a particular emphasis on those periods that visually manifest the distinct projects of the nation,” the munal’s galleries were organized according to shifts in cultural patronage from the Catholic Church and Bourbon monarchy to the post-­independence and postrevolutionary states, and to private sponsors in the form of bourgeois individuals.30 This approach to the display of its collections was an overt response to the essentially ahistorical displays of Mexican art created by Fernando Gamboa, both in his traveling exhibition Mexican Art from Antiquity to the Present and in the permanent installations he designed first in the galleries at the Palace of Fine Arts and then for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964. The munal’s permanent exhibition was thus conceived as an explicit critique of the mystification of cultural production in Mexican museums. Its penultimate gallery consisted of two portraits of the artist, author, and administrator Adolfo Best Maugard juxtaposed with a selec-

tion of artesanías (folk art) from Roberto Montenegro’s 5,000-­piece collection and several works of art from the Mexican school of painting executed by artists trained in Best Maugard’s method of drawing and indebted to the aesthetic traditions he, Rivera, and Montenegro (among others) identified in the kind of manual industries on display.31 The two portraits of Best Maugard, one a self portrait, the other executed by Diego Rivera, exemplified the thematic of the twentieth-­century galleries, wherein the development of modernism in Mexico was narrated as a dialectic between cosmopolitan aesthetic influences and nationalist social concerns, ultimately unified through the postrevolutionary state’s promotion of cultural mestizaje and its artists’ elaboration of a native vanguardism rooted in pre-­Hispanic and popular art. Karen Cordero Reiman, a member of the curatorial team responsible for the installation, explains the didactic intent of the installation in an essay she published on the two paintings for the munal’s academic journal, Memoria: Museo Nacional de Arte. The Rivera, Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913), presents Best Maugard as an elegant dandy gazing upon the industrialized landscape of the metropolis from a Parisian balcony. The mannerist style and exaggerated perspective of the figure and foreground recall Rivera’s flirtation with El Greco and Spanish naturalism, while the urban landscape synthesizes a compendium of vanguard idioms, from Cézanne’s analysis of space to a cubo-­futurist description of movement to Delaunay’s simultanism.32 Conversely, Best Maugard’s Self-­Portrait from just ten years later (1923) depicts the artist as a governmental bureaucrat. The theatrical stagelike setting, tipped-­ up perspective, high horizon line, and simplified iconography are drawn from the naive styles of popular art and Best Maugard’s research into pre-­ Columbian decorative motifs, much of which he

undertook in Paris at the Musée de l’Homme during the period in which Rivera painted his portrait. In this self-­portrait Best Maugard represents himself much as Rivera had in 1913, as “master of ceremonies” on the stage of modernity.33 Only now his aesthetic theories are rendered literally through the hybrid style and iconography he elaborated in his enormously influential 1923 Method of Drawing (Metodo de dibujo: Tradición y evolución del arte mexicano). The juxtaposition of these two paintings in the exhibition illustrated the transition from what scholars have distinguished as modernist nationalism (1906–20) to the Mexican school of painting (1920–60), which resulted from the cultural reforms of President Obregón (1921–24) and his minister of public education, José Vasconcelos. Foremost among these was the commissioning of public murals and the staging of exhibitions of popular art in which Rivera, Montenegro, and Best Maugard played key roles. Through this didactic display the curators sought to make visible the material and social networks of power and knowledge that linked artists, collecting, and cultural administration. Cordero Reiman explains that the decision to display popular art in a museum dedicated to fine art was made in 1988 when the munal’s organizers decided to exhibit Montenegro’s objects as a collection in order to indicate changes in the aesthetic valorization of lo popular and to reveal the importance of this new appreciation to the elaboration of fine art between 1915 and 1950.34 Montenegro’s collection of artesanías served to explain visually how the derivative modernism of Rivera’s portrait was transformed into the cultivated national populism of the Mexican school of painting represented by Best Maugard’s intentionally naive style. Likewise, the very fact of the collection itself marked the historical emergence of an intellectual interest in “the popular” in the Conclusion  187

postrevolutionary period and the myriad governmental initiatives to unify a “land of many contrasts” into a modern nation through the symbolic and economic agency of folk production. Rather than reinforce the myth of a static and anachronistic art form, the munal’s curators demonstrated how the material culture of popular sectors was codified and re-­functionalized as a resource for cultural politics in the 1920s. Perhaps more important, this exhibitionary strategy presented Mexican culture as the product of political, economic, and social calculations, arguing visually that national consciousness was forged not through an enlightenment narrative of liberal becoming (as proclaimed in the exhibitions at the National History Museum) or the recovery of an essentialized past rooted in indigenous traditions (as argued through the installations at the National Anthropology Museum) but rather as a hegemonic construction.

“Dismantl[ing] the Official PRI Discourse and Its Use of Art”: The Independent Curator Since its inception, the munal has had to balance its role as a state institution with the social and political agendas of its directors and curators. And unlike any other federal museum, it has activated the museum’s potential to function as a critical (albeit limited) public sphere. At times this has proved tricky. As a federally funded and administered institution, the museum, naturally, has been enlisted by pri functionaries for the purposes of propaganda. For example, in 1983 the museum’s director, Jorge Hernández Campos, commissioned Olivier Debroise, an independent curator, to organize an exhibition that explored the decade of the 1920s in collaboration with young conceptual artists. Preliminarily titled México, Años 20 188   Conclusion

or Los Veinte en México, it was slated for a 1985 opening. Debroise describes the working concept as a fairly “straightforward ‘Paris-­Moscow’ type show.” However, a rancorous standoff erupted between Campos and the curatorial team over the content of the last gallery, dedicated to the final year of the decade: 1929. Debroise recalls: Jorge Hernández Campos wanted some sort of altarpiece to the foundations of the pnr, and the curatorial team wanted something more “honest” in terms of what really happened that year (Mella assassination, banishment of the Communists, political killings by the right wings, electoral fraud, exile of Vasconcelos, etc. . . .). Discussions about this specific room (which was to be designed by Carlos Aguirre, Rowena Morales, and others) went on and on for weeks, until we got to the final break up: Campos just told me, “You are out of the project.” I guess he thought he was going to do it himself, or with another team, as the research was completed (and paid for), but then, nothing happened. The team resigned.35

Debroise attributes this difference of opinion over the end of the 1920s to Campos’s affiliation with the pri; not only was he very close with Manuel Bartlett, the minister of government under President Miguel de la Madrid, but he worked as a political journalist at the newspaper Unomásuno under a pri byline. Despite Campos’s often radical cultural affiliations—he had a long history of working with and supporting young artists from the grupos—his political allegiance to the party prevailed over the intellectual integrity of his museum. While the exhibition as planned might have garnered the institution some clout as an independent arena for political engagement, it would certainly have made things difficult for a director who had earned his position through a combination of good works and political ­favoritism.

The munal depended on inba and, indirectly (through the sep), on the office of the president for its funding (as do all public museums in Mexico). But perhaps more significant, the directorships of all public museums are allocated by the administrations of each incoming president. Thus there is a constant game of musical chairs, as museum professionals are either rewarded or remonstrated through the cronyism that sustains Mexico’s voluminous governmental bureaucracy. Rather than directly controlling its cultural institutions, however, the pri’s agenda has always been filtered through semi-­autonomous ministries and institutes, often staffed (despite the desires of the party) by left-­leaning intellectuals who have learned to operate cannily within the tacit boundaries of postrevolutionary ideology. Furthermore, as this book argues, it has been in the ruling party’s best interest to allow institutions to operate without the appearance of censorship, for in this fashion its leaders sought to sustain the image of their essential benevolence. Cultural institutions were crucial to the consolidation of the pri as a popular regime; thus during the periods of greatest crisis in its political authority, the terrain of culture was often one of the more significant arenas for recrafting consensus. Consequently, cultural institutions, and particularly art museums, have been the site of some of the most egregious examples of state promotion, but they have also produced some of the more critical voices for reform. For example, in 1989 Debroise was once again brought on as part of a curatorial team to organize an exhibition of Mexican vanguard art for the munal. As one component of a yearlong municipal arts festival celebrating Mexico City between the years 1920 and 1950 (Ciudad de México / Años 20–50), this exhibition was commissioned by the National Committee of Expositions and Temporary Events, a subcommittee of the National Council of Culture

and the Arts (Coordinación Nacional de Exposiciones y Eventos Temporales del conaculta) under the leadership of conaculta’s second director, Rafael Tovar y Teresa. The curatorial team, comprised of art historians, found fault with the suggested theme and proposed instead a critical investigation of twentieth-­century Mexican art that would explore its relationship to the formal and ideological currents of the international avant-­garde. Once accepted, the team convened a three-­month research seminar during which they identified a fundamental opposition between nationalism and internationalism structuring Mexican modernism from the 1920s forward. The exhibition then proceeded as a deconstruction of this fundamental binary from which the group derived a series of oppositions and historical contradictions spanning the decades of Mexican modernism.36 After intense discussion of the meaning of each term, the group decided upon the title “The Great Dream, Modernity and Modernization in Mexican Art,” to signal an ironic critique of the ideological project at the heart of Mexican modernity. “The conceptual framework,” Debroise explains, “was related to a post-­Rubin Primitivism/ Octoberish37 deconstruction of how the iconography operates in the political terrain.”38 Tovar y Teresa objected to the juxtaposition of the terms “modernization” and “dream” in the exhibition’s title. However, Graciela de la Torre, the munal’s director, was a part of the curatorial team, so the exhibition survived in form and content. Nonetheless, after a long struggle, “The Great Dream” was dropped from the title. With the modification of the title, the critical thrust of the show was obscured in the publicity for the exhibition. Audiences participating in the many events slated for the municipal celebration could easily interpret the new title as an assertion of Mexican modernity and modernization rather Conclusion  189

than an interrogation of its claims. Nonetheless, the exhibition itself and its catalogue maintained this critical edge. Both are hallmarks in the scholarly reevaluation of national culture by leftist intellectuals, and their long-­term repercussions can be seen in the munal’s ongoing efforts to explore the links between art and political ideology in its permanent and temporary exhibitions, like the 1990s installation of artesanía.39 Perhaps more important, in March of 1991, the research team convened for this exhibition formed Curare, an independent group of artists, critics, and researchers dedicated, in the words of Debroise, to “dismantl[ing] the official pri discourse and its use of art.”40

Whither Official Culture? Muralism as Chimera Curare’s legacy in Mexico’s politicized cultural sphere cannot be underestimated and deserves to be historicized in depth in its own right. However, here I discuss but one recent project in which the impact of the rigorous curatorial work inaugurated by Debroise and Curare can be discerned. In 2004, as part of the seventieth-­anniversary celebration of the inauguration of the Palace of Fine Arts, an exhibition was organized at the Palace that encompassed a critical revaluation of the on-­ site murals while also serving as the occasion for a sociological survey of their audience. The exhibition, entitled The Chimera of the Murals at the Palace of Fine Arts, was coordinated by Mercedes Iturbe, an inba functionary, in addition to the cultural critic and author Carlos Monsivás and the sociologist Néstor García Canclini.41 Monsiváis has been one of the foremost critics of postrevolutionary cultural history and in particular the way that the ruling party and technocrats have constituted and exploited the popular for governmental initiatives. As the foremost proselytizer of 190   Conclusion

the affective force of the popular, Monsiváis has achieved an international reputation as one of the major essayists of the 1960s. Likewise, García Canclini has been at the forefront of sociological studies of citizenship, cultural policy, and popular audiences. He wrote the introduction to Rita Eder’s reception study of the Hammer Collection and was co-­author of the 1987 audience study The Public Surveyed. Moreover, his book Hybrid Cultures offered one of the first and most influential assessments of Mexican museology and display in the postrevolutionary construction of the national popular.42 The intellectual credentials of these two scholars alone signal the critical intentions of this exhibition as well as the extent to which the criticism of official culture has opened up a space in mainstream museum practice for institutional critique. The Chimera of the Murals at the Palace of Fine Arts sought to explore Mexican cultural history through the diverse stylistic and thematic approaches of the major murals in situ. In the past, following Fernando Gamboa’s attempts to reconcile the three greats with Tamayo’s critique into a single depoliticized Kunstwollen, the text panels and on-­site display of the murals at the Palace of Fine Arts had endeavored to obscure the ideological and stylistic differences implicit in each mural in order to better secure their veneration as icons of official culture. This exhibition, however, offered a new approach, one that suggested that Mexican muralism, if unified at all, was akin to the mythical chimera, an imaginary monster whose body consists of the body parts of different animals. By invoking the chimera, the curators signaled that muralism was both, myth and monster, a composite creature that had mutated over time. The exhibition instantiated this claim with displays devoted to each mural that not only included film footage of the artists along with preparatory drawings and photographs but also explored the differences embedded in each mural,

with a particular emphasis on how each artist depicts the human body and thereby establishes a relationship with the viewer’s body.43 In this respect the exhibition’s didactics were particularly attuned to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s aspirations for a cinematographic mural art that could activate the viewer by forcing her to move. In essence the exhibition called attention to this dimension of mural practice and history while also bringing newer art historical and museum studies concerns about embodiment and the way that exhibitions target, move, and constitute the viewer’s body to bear upon these “plaster saints.” By emphasizing not only the political and formal differences among the artists but also the way each work responded to the contingencies of its political moment, muralism emerged, for the first time in public exhibitionary discourse, as a contentious, internally factional, and above all historical phenomenon. In addition to the exhibition’s attempt to reframe the on-­site murals for viewers, it was also the occasion for a new viewers’ survey conducted by García Canclini in collaboration with Pati Legarreta and Cecilia Vilchis.44 The team observed the behavior of museum visitors before the murals and conducted interviews of visitors and the self-­employed guides who provide tours of the Palace and the murals daily. They found numerous consistencies with earlier surveys. In particular, the audience was overwhelmingly national as opposed to foreign and largely comprised of educated people between the ages of twenty-­one and sixty, who view a visit to the Palace as a ritual of citizenship. Likewise, they noted that the ornate architecture, presence of guards, and use of metal detectors at the Palace entrance present significant barriers of access to the majority of Mexicans in the lower social classes. However, among those surveyed (who ranged from schoolchildren compelled by homework assignments to visit the museum to young couples on dates to highly

educated citizens and foreign tourists), the team found a surprisingly varied audience response. Whereas in prior reception studies, the surveyors had been primarily interested in the homogenizing effects of the national culture program on audiences, this group attended equally to the heterogeneous responses visitors relayed. The team concluded that these differences mapped onto distinct levels of education, and that school history books and the mass media significantly inform viewer responses. They argued that those with more sophistication about art were more likely to appreciate various levels of meaning in the murals and more likely to query their messages. And yet, they note, “from the lowest level of complexity . . . to the specialists, trained publics or those who seek out tour guides or read beyond the anecdotal, the works of the muralists remain a multifaceted historical matrix, a dense repertoire of themes and images. This diversity contained in the works seems to exceed didactic objectives.”45 Rather than criticizing the didactic aims of the muralists or exhibition for failing to communicate effectively with the public, the surveyors celebrated the capacity of mural art to trigger diverse responses and called for greater interest in and comprehension of the plural publics generated by different social sectors. With this call, the surveyors marked an important shift in the critique and assessment of official culture. Rather than viewing its effects as all encompassing, they argue that the project was never as effective as the critique of hegemony would suggest. With the discovery of the multifaceted nature of reception and the plural nature of audiences, this survey appealed to a new conception of the public and the role of cultural politics. Its authors suggested that technocrats and leftist intellectuals should listen to the public—here conceived as “los públicos” or publics— rather than continue to minister to their preconceived ideas of who or what it should be.46 Conclusion  191

Synthetic Antagonisms or the People in Mural Art As the institutional history chronicled throughout this study shows, within the museum, mural art is instrumentalized. Its meaning, however, is never established a priori. Rather, as García Canclini’s survey of audiences at the Palace of Fine Arts reminds us, the meaning of mural art is crafted through the intersubjective dynamic between image, institution, and audience. To conclude, I recall Toby Miller’s description of the museum as an “ethical zone” in which “citizen-­addressees” are hailed as subjects and offered “a position in history and a relationship to that history.”47 As Miller argues, however, the “shift from self to collective that constitutes citizenship” is always messy, never completed or predictable.48 With this in mind, we can temper the celebratory claims for mural art as an expression of a popular will with the overdeterminations of political economy without lapsing uncritically into either. In the end, the popularity of this art form is achieved through participation in the rituals of heritage. To quote Ernesto Laclau, the popular appears as a “synthetic-­antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology.”49 The question posed by leftist intellectuals in the aftermath of 1968 remains: how might this art be re-­instrumentalized within the museum toward more egalitarian modes of popular citizenship? An important step toward this goal has been the shift in the critical discourse on muralism from the heroic or complicit intentions of its practitioners toward the many ways this cultural technology has been taken up, struggled over, and rearticulated within the museum and other popular media throughout its eighty-­year history. While it is relatively easy to assert the instability of meaning or to cleave to a faith in resistant reading on the part of active institutional subjects, it is much more difficult to demonstrate instances of 192   Conclusion

this. There is an ongoing tendency to treat institutional culture as fundamentally oppressive. And while many of the mural artists participated—at some times willingly, at others unwittingly—in a state project that had as its primary goal the disciplining of the revolutionary struggle and popular classes, it is important to recall that the meaning of their art continues to be produced through a combination of strategies, some official and normative, others subaltern and ad hoc. In a related example García Canclini has documented popular rearticulations of state patrimony by social actors who have used the monument to Benito Juárez in the Alameda as a stage for publicizing their disappeared children and, conversely, agitating for abortion rights.50 In each instance, Juárez’s status as the father of the modern nation-­state was called upon to validate claims made against that state. As official culture the significations of this monument have been overdetermined by the state; however, this does not preclude a popular revision of its paternalism. The effect of this rearticulation is made possible because all of Mexico’s cultural patrimony has been politicized through the governmental processes of official culture. As the 2004 visitor survey at the Palace of Fine Arts revealed, we can be certain that individuals derive their own idiosyncratic meaning from mural art and the museums that house them. While private ruminations are not the material of collective organization, given the proper circumstances, these resistant readings can be mobilized for diverse political ends. The popular can be deduced only from these moments of discursive uptake, those acts of symbolic consumption that revise national truths in attempts to reverse the rules by which citizenship is governed. In Mexico culture is the terrain of politics, and this is not in spite of but because of the institutionalization of mural art.

Illustration credits Permission to reproduce the following illustrations is gratefully acknowledged. page 8 1. José Clemente Orozco, Hernan Cortés and “la Malinche,” 1926. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 10 2. Diego Rivera, Our Bread, 1928. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City / Artists Rights Society, New York. page 26 3. Exterior view of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 29 4. Leopoldo Méndez, Calaveras of the National Mausoleum, wood block print, cover illustration for first issue of Frente a Frente, November 1934 page 30 5. Carlos Obregón Santacilia (architect) and Oliverio Martínez (sculptor), Monument to the Revolution, 1938. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 33 6. José Clemente Orozco, Catharsis, 1934. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 35 7. Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1934. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico / Artists Rights Society, New York. page 46 8. David Alfaro Siqueiros, The New Democracy, 1944– 45. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York

© 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 47 9. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Victims of War, 1944–45. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 48 10. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Victim of Fascism, 1944–45. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 54 11. David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 1950–51. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 55 12. David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc, 1950–51. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 58 13. Diego Rivera, The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace: A Realist Fantasy, 1951. © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico / Artists Rights Society, New York. page 61 14. Rufino Tamayo, Homage to the Indian Race, 1952. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2010 Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo.

page 68 15. Rufino Tamayo, The Birth of Our Nationality, 1952. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2010 Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo.

page 105 25. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of horse, 1957–65. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City.

page 70 16. Rufino Tamayo, Mexico Today, 1953. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/ México/2010 Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo.

page 106 26. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of the revolutionary phalanx, 1957– 65. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City.

page 74 17. Jorge González Camarena, Humanity Freeing Itself, 1963. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 79 18. Exterior view of Chapultepec Castle viewed from below, with the monument to the niños héroes in the foreground. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 86 19. Hall of the Missionaries, c. 1950. conaculta-­ inah-­m ex. Reproduction authorized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History. page 95 20. Jorge González Camarena, The Fusion of Two Cultures, 1963. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 96 21. Jorge González Camarena, The Constitution of 1917, 1967. Photo by conaculta-­i nah-­m ex. Reproduction authorized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 98 22. José Clemente Orozco, Juárez and the Reform, 1948. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 100 23. Juan O’Gorman, Mural of Independence, 1960–61. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © Landucci Editores. page 104 24. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, general view, 1957–65. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City.

page 108 27. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz crushing the constitution underfoot and entertaining his supporters with dancing girls, 1957–65. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 110 28. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From Porfirianism to the Revolution, detail of the encounter of the armies, 1957– 65. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 112 29. Juan O’Gorman, History of Mexico, 1950–52. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © Landucci Editores. page 113 30. Juan O’Gorman, detail of History of Mexico, 1950– 52. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © Landucci Editores. page 115 31. David Alfaro Siqueiros, The People to the University, the University to the People, 1950–52. Photo by sef / Art Resource, New York © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 117 32. Illustration of the “Historic Stages of Mexico” published in Mi libro de tercer año: Historia y civismo, August 1960. Secretaría de Educación Pública. page 118 33. Detail of David Alfaro Siqueiros, The People to the University, the University to the People, 1950–52. Photo by Mary K. Coffey © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City.

illustration credits  195

page 124 34. Juan O’Gorman, Effective Vote—No Re-­election, 1960–61. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © Landucci Editores. page 125 35. Juan O’Gorman, The March of Loyalty, detail of Porfirian Feudalism, 1967–. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk / Art Resource, New York © Landucci Editores. page 128 36. Exterior view of the National Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 135 37. View of interior patio and cantilevered canopy of National Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 136 38. Support column by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, eastern orientation, National Anthropology Museum. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 137 39. Support column by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, western orientation, National Anthropology Museum. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 143 40. View of the Mexica gallery, National Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. page 152 41. Rufino Tamayo, Duality, 1964. Photo by Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo. © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2010 Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo. page 153 42. Rafael Coronel, Oaxaca gallery mural, 1964. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. Image reproduced courtesy of Rafael Coronel L.S.G.

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page 154 43. Arturo Estrada, detail of The Hill of the Virgin and the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina, in Juquila, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. Image reproduced courtesy of Arturo Estrada. page 156 44. Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in Huichol-­ Cora gallery, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. Image reproduced courtesy of Feruccio Asta Rodríguez. page 156 45. Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in Huichol-­ Cora gallery, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. Image reproduced courtesy of Feruccio Asta Rodríguez. page 157 46. Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in Huichol-­ Cora gallery, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. Image reproduced courtesy of Feruccio Asta Rodríguez. page 157 47. Mathias Goeritz, detail of rope mural in Huichol-­ Cora gallery, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. Image reproduced courtesy of Feruccio Asta Rodríguez. page 158 48. Adolfo Mexiac, Campesinos, 1964. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Artists Rights Society, New York / somaap, Mexico City. page 160 49. Leonora Carrington, The Magical World of the Maya, 1963. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk © 2010 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society, New York. page 168 50. Olympic logo for Mexico City Olympics, designed by Lance Wyman and Peter Murdoch. Courtesy of Lance Wyman.

Notes Introduction 1. The phrase “art on the Left” encapsulates the broad range of radical art practices during the first half of the twentieth century, from the John Reed clubs of the 1920s through the Popular Front. See Denning, The Cultural Front, and Hemingway, Artists on the Left. 2. Siqueiros, Rivera, Guerrero, Revueltas, Orozco, Guadarrama, Cueto, and Mérida, “Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors.” 3. Brenner, Idols behind Altars; Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance; Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States; Rochfort, Mexican Muralists; Tibol, Arte y politica and David Alfaro Siqueiros; and Wolfe, Diego Rivera and The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. 4. See, for example, Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Duncan, Civilizing Rituals; Duncan and Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual” and “The Universal Survey Museum”; Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures; Karp, Mullen Kreamer, and Lavine, Museums and Communities; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; McClellan, Inventing the Louvre; and Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction. 5. See, for example, Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum; Karp, Kratz, Szwaja, and Ybarra-­ Frausto, Museum Frictions; Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture; and McClellan, Art and Its Publics. 6. Harris, “Polling for Opinion.” 7. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, and Staniszewski, The Power of Display. 8. Hankins, “Baubles, Blue Walls, and Bakelite.” 9. Duncan, “Museums and Department Stores.” 10. See Altshuler, The Avant-­Garde in Exhibition. 11. The term “contact zone” derives from James Clifford’s salutory work, The Predicament of Culture. 12. Paz, “Re/Visions,” 115.

13. Ibid., 133. 14. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, 27. 15. As Mark Alan Healey, the translator of Bartra’s essay, points out, Bartra’s use of the term “office” in his title and embedded in his term “official culture” is ironic and relies on a host of meanings derived from religious practice—the Divine Office—that are not commonplace within American-­English usage. He writes, “Bartra’s notion of the Mexican office refers to . . . the sacralized ritual practice of cultural arbiters within the Mexican state—‘official culture’—setting out the canonical forms and norms of Mexicanness.” See note 1 in Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 3. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 6. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 9–10. 23. Cuevas, “The Cactus Curtain,” 116. 24. Ibid., 115. 25. Ibid., 118. 26. Ibid., 114. 27. Ibid., 118. 28. Ibid., 119. 29. Ibid., 113. 30. Ibid. 31. Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 9. 32. Ibid., 6. 33. Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 31. 34. Ibid., 40. 35. Vasconcelos, “The Race Problem in Latin America,” 92. 36. Ibid., 100.

37. Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 30. 38. For a discussion of “romance” as foundational fiction, see Sommer, Foundational Fictions. 39. Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition. 40. See Hedrick, Mestizo Modernism. 41. I take this phrase from Playing Indian, Philip Deloria’s book on cultural appropriation in the context of the United States. 42. See Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance; Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America; Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States; Rochfort, Mexican Muralists; and Rodríguez Prampolini, “Rivera’s Concept of History.” 43. See Downs, Diego Rivera; Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera; Lee, Painting on the Left; and Oles, Walls to Paint On. 44. Bertram Wolfe characterizes Rivera’s first mural, Creation, painted in 1923 for the Bolivar Amphitheater at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, as a “false start” in his biography of the artist. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 156. 45. Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, 133. 46. Siqueiros, Rivera, Guerrero, Revueltas, Orozco, Guadarrama, Cueto, and Mérida, “Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors.” 47. See Benjamin, La Revolución, 13–24. 48. Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 59. 49. Ibid. 50. See Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 129–58, and Schuler, Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt, 9–32. 51. Oles, Walls to Paint On. 52. Oles, “The Mexican Murals of Marion and Grace Greenwood,” 113–14. 53. Ibid., 127. 54. Ibid. 55. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, 27. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. Goldman relies on Suárez, Inventario del muralism mexicano, for her statistics. 58. Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 265. 59. Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 6. 60. Ibid., 12. 61. Ibid., 197. 62. Ibid., 197. Folgarait cites Foucault’s Power/Knowl-

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edge. However, his conception of the relationship between subjects and power is much more Althusserian than Foucauldian. He relies heavily on the term “ideology,” and the thrust of his argument leads toward the conclusion that mural art unwittingly helped to cultivate a form of false consciousness among Mexicans. For Foucault, subjectification involves both forms of subjection (what Althusser called interpellation) and the more productive act of becoming a self-­reflective subject, that is, cultivating a form of self-­knowledge through the ways you are discursively constituted as a subject, or what he termed “techniques of the self.” This subtle difference is key to the ethics of Foucault’s notion of power and something that is more explicit in the interviews and essays collected, translated, and published posthumously. Most scholars who use Foucault interpret his use of words like “power” and “subjectification” as signifying processes of domination and repression. However, Foucault was insistent about what he called the “productive” capacity of power. It was this aspect of subjectification that he endeavored to trace in his studies of the sexual, penal, and medical subject. For discussions of subjectification, see Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” The Birth of Biopolitics, and the preface to The History of Sexuality. For relevant discussions of Foucault’s concept of power and his critique of Marxian notions of ideology, interpellation, and false consciousness, see Foucault, “Truth and Power”; “We ‘Other Victorians,’” in The History of Sexuality, 1–14; and “The Concern for Truth.” 63. Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 265. 64. For a discussion of reception aesthetics in art history, see Kemp, “The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception.” 65. See Butler, Excitable Speech. 66. Ibid., 78. 67. Ibid. 68. See Bourdieu, Distinction, and Bourdieu, Darbel, and Scnapper, The Love of Art. While Bourdieu’s work has been enormously influential worldwide, Mexican scholars have critiqued the Franco-­centric assumptions that structure his conclusions while adapting his methods to the specificities of the Mexican context. In particular, they have found that the hard distinction between high and low that is secured through the classed mechanisms of taste in France does not exist in Mexico, where visitors to museums are very likely to evaluate modernist art through criteria conventionally

limited to popular and folk art. They attribute this deviation to differences in the educational systems and notions of national culture within each nation. See Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta. 69. Bennett, “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” 28. 70. Ibid. 71. Jacqueline Stevens has demonstrated that Foucault’s original discussion of “genealogy” versus “history” in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” was based on a misreading of Nietzsche. She notes as well that this misreading has been uncritically taken up by scholars in cultural and literary studies as a “method” opposed to history and promoted in textbooks. Stevens is correct to point this out, and it is for this reason that I use the term “genealogy” with caution, to signal only Foucault’s designation of his approach toward the analysis of discourse and power and not to endorse his reading of Nietzsche. In this chapter I clarify the narrow Foucauldian sense in which I use the term, but I maintain throughout that I am writing history, not doing genealogy as it is popularly conceived. See Stevens, “On the Morals of Genealogy.” 72. See the introduction to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, and “The Birth of Biopolitics.” 73. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 73–87. 74. Ibid., 87–104. 75. Nikolas Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” 41. 76. See Watts, “Government and Modernity.” 77. Ibid. 78. Dean, “Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,” 211. 79. Ibid., 210. 80. Ibid., 42. 81. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 133. 82. Ibid. 83. Sayer, “Everyday Forms of State Formation,” 373– 75. 84. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 133. 85. Miller, Technologies of Truth, 22, 57–59. 86. Ibid., 11–13. 87. Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 6. 88. Ibid. 89. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 121. 90. Ibid., 113. 91. Ibid., 117. 92. Ibid., 118.

93. Ibid., 131. 94. Ibid. 95. For a general history of Mexican museums, see Fernández, Historia de los museos de México. 96. Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta, 33. 97. See Fernández, Historia de los museos en México, and Morales Moreno, “History and Patriotism in the National Museum of Mexico.” 98. Castañeda, In the Museum of Maya Culture. 99. Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta, 20–21. 100. Urteaga Castro-­Pozo, “Museos y exposiciones,” 291. My translation from original Spanish: “como espacios culturales a través de los cuales se difundiría la ideología del nacionalismo revolucionario producto del movimiento popular de 1910–1917.” 101. Coffey, “‘All Mexico on a Wall.’” 102. Larrauri and Miguel, “Iker Larrauri en México,” Punto, 17 October 1983, excerpted in Schmilchuk, Museo, 354. My translation from original Spanish: “La intención de crear conciencia histórica, de consolidar la identidad nacional por medio de planteamientos didácticos de lo que era la cultura nacional; y didácticos no solo en el sentido de mostrar los productos de esa cultura sino también los procesos que los generan.” 103. Paz, “Posdata,” 323. 104. Reyes Palma, “Mural Devices,” 217. 105. Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 4.

Chapter 1: A Palace for the People 1. Quoted in Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 93. 2. Cordero Reiman, “Narraciones corpóreas e incorporaciones en los murales de Bellas Artes,” 67, 80. 3. Paz, “Re/Visions,” 131. 4. Sanchez Lara and Varagnolo, “Sketch of the Bellas Artes,” 5. 5. De la Torre, “The Decoration of the Palace of Fine Arts,” 91. 6. Cruz Arvea, “Adamo Boari,” 90. 7. De la Torre, “The Decoration of the Palace of Fine Arts,” 92. 8. Creole indigenismo is the nineteenth-­century cultural nationalism in which artists and intellectu-

Notes  199

als promoted the elite indigenous traditions of the ancient past as the proto-­culture of modern Mexico. This variant of indigenismo is distinguished from postrevolutionary indigenismo by the latter’s emphasis on contemporary Indian populations and peasant movements. 9. Sanchez Lara and Varagnolo, “Sketch of the Bellas Artes,” 88. 10. El Palacio de Bellas Artes, 65. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. Quoted in Flores Marini, “The Building and the City,” 91. 13. Sanchez Lara and Varagnolo, “Sketch of the Bellas Artes,” 89. 14. González Villegas, “The National Institute of Fine Arts,” 100. 15. El Palacio de Bellas Artes, 51. My translation from original Spanish: “un público cuya ignorancia en materia de artes plásticas se manifiesta a menudo como incomprensión y menosprecio de las obras pictóricas de nuestros días.” 16. Ibid., 73. My translation from original Spanish: “si el Estado acepta la obligación moral de velar por la alta cultura, la existencia misma de la confía nuestra Constitutción, tácitamente, a la responsabilidad del ciudadano.” 17. Ibid., 68. 18. “Solemne inagueración del Palacio de Bellas Artes,” 1. My translation from original Spanish: “El Palacio de Bellas Artes, centro de divulgación cultural, uno de los puntos básicos del programa revolucionario.” 19. Diablo, “Hoy sera inaugurado el fatuouso Palacio de Bellas Artes.” 20. “Solemne inauguración del Palacio de las Bellas Artes,” 1. 21. Reyes Palma, “50 años de artes plástica y política en México (1934–1984) I,” 34. My translation from original Spanish: “el cual consideraba el edificio como símbolo afrentoso, herencia dictatorial, cuya recuperación establecía una orientación cultural regresiva y suntuaria.” This is Reyes Palma’s synopsis of the accusation in the manifesto signed by Ermilio Abreu Gómez, Gilberto Bosques, Fernando Leal, Germán Cueto, Manuel Maples Arce, and Fermín Revueltas. 22. “Solemne inagueración del Palacio de Bellas Artes,” 4. 23. Olsen, Artifacts of Revolution, 102. 24. Ibid., 102–69. Pani served in various government

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positions. He was undersecretary of public education in 1911, minister of industry and commerce in 1917 and 1918, and minister of public housing and credit from 1923 to 1927 and 1932 to 1933. Aarón Sáenz served as minister of foreign affairs and minister of public education in 1930. Miguel Alemán was a senator from the state of Veracruz between 1930 and 1936, then governor of Veracruz from 1936 to 1939, minister of the interior from 1940 to 1945, and finally president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952. 25. The decision to paint portable frescos was due in part to the recent destruction of Rivera’s Rockefeller mural and to the artists’ nervousness about the state’s renewed patronage. Both determined that should problems with the commission arise, they could move the frescos and thereby avoid the destruction of their work. 26. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 102–32. 27. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919). 28. The flaming backdrop surely influenced Justino Fernández when he named the mural Catharsis. Clemente Orozco, the artist’s son, insists that this was not what Orozco titled the mural. Orozco’s title, he claims, was The Contemporary World. It is probable that this is the case, but the artist never publicly repudiated Fernández’s title. For Fernández’s account, see Fernández, Orozco, 71–72. For Clemente Orozco’s account, see Iturbe, Monsiváis, and García Canclini, Quimera de los murales del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 91. 29. Orozco was notoriously reticent about the subject matter of his art. He rarely drafted statements about his intentions and limited his public writing to discussions of his use of dynamic asymmetry, the fresco method, and his convictions that art was first and foremost a plastic exercise. See Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, and Textos de Orozco. 30. For a more elaborated version of this interpretation, see Coffey, “Angels and Prostitutes.” 31. Bliss, Compromised Positions, 183. 32. Ibid., 155. 33. Ibid., 180. 34. Ibid., 189–206. 35. The Rockefellers wanted Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Rivera to paint large murals on canvas in a black-­and-­white palette. Both Matisse and Picasso refused the commission. Brangwyn and Sert were brought on later, much to Rivera’s dismay. (He considered both to be substandard artists.)

36. The original sketch is reproduced in Diego Rivera: Catálogo general, 173. 37. This controversy has been well documented, in the periodical literature of the day and subsequently in the historical literature on Mexican muralism and Diego Rivera. See Bloch, “On Location with Diego Rivera”; Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera; Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised”; and Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 317–40. 38. Rivera would execute “portable murals” for exhibition, but up until this point, his site-­specific commissions had been conceived and executed as multi-­panel cycles that were permanent features of the architecture in which he painted. 39. Orozco had always struggled with the wall, preferring to string together iconic images rather than to conceive of a coherent cycle per se. He would eventually make this a virtue in his late works, especially with the complex spatial structure of his frescos at the Hospicio Cabañas. Painting a single wall at the Palace, therefore, did not represent a compromise of his mural style as it did for Rivera. 40. Anita Brenner, “Diego Rivera: Fiery Crusader of the Paint Brush,” New York Times, 2 April 1933, reprinted in Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera, 74. 41. For an extended discussion of the differences between the two versions of this mural and their implications for interpreting the cultural politics of the Palace of Fine Arts version, see Coffey, “Man at the Crossroads.” 42. Because women are biologically responsible for pregnancy, the propagation of national subjects is contingent upon their bodies. As anxieties over the racial makeup of national populations grew, women’s reproduction was disciplined medically, juridically, and morally. Psychoanalysis, sterilization, anti-­ miscegenation laws, and Christian dogma were only some of the resources in the social-­scientific regulation of female sexuality. For essays on the eugenic legislation of women’s reproduction in Latin America and the United States, see Kline, Building a Better Race, and Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics.” 43. In addition to covering the Rockefeller controversy, the press was also chronicling the suppression of modern art in Germany. While conservative American artists championed Hitler’s cultural conservatism, the Left drew parallels between his censorship and Rocke-

feller’s attempts to censor Rivera. See “Hitler and Art,” Art Digest, 15 March 1933, reprinted in Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera, 66, for an example of the conservative reaction, and Anita Brenner, “Art’s Storied Debate Renewed,” New York Times Magazine, 25 February 1934, also reprinted in Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera, 176, for the opposing view. 44. See Diego Rivera’s introduction to Wolfe, Portrait of America, 11–32, and “El discurso de Diego y la determinación de los Rockefeller,” El Universal, 16 May 1933, reprinted in Herner de Larrea, Larrea, Herrerias, and Sirvent, Diego Rivera, 106–7. 45. For a compelling argument about the mural’s relationship to mass media, see Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised.” 46. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 322. 47. Ibid., 261–75. 48. Eisenberg, “Battle of the Century.” 49. The Fourth International was a multinational coalition of the Left opposition to counter the growing conservatism and bureaucratization of the Soviet state under Stalin. Lead by Leon Trotsky and unified by an adherence to his Bolshevik-­Leninist platform, they scheduled their first conference for February 1933 in Paris, but its resolutions were rendered moot when Hitler defeated the German workers’ movement after the National Socialists took power. Henceforth, the Fourth International declared itself independent of the Soviet Comitern and dedicated itself to fostering a new international Marxist movement. For a discussion of the Fourth International, see Reisner, Documents of the Fourth International, and Frank, The Fourth International. 50. Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-­ Century Mexico, 46. 51. Ibid., 43–46. 52. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 129–58. 53. Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-­ Century Mexico, 47–79. 54. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 16. 55. Ibid., 17–18. 56. Ibid., 18. 57. Ibid., 19. 58. On the basis of an interview with Lola Álvarez Bravo, Olivier Debroise argues that the two artists planned and rehearsed the debate ahead of time to gar-

Notes  201

ner publicity for mural art. However, when Rivera realized that Siqueiros was using the opportunity to renew his personal attacks, he became angry, and what had been a collaborative stunt became a more serious affair. Debroise, Portrait of a Decade, 51. 59. The Siqueiros-­Rivera dispute was closely chronicled by the press as it happened. See Eisenberg, “Battle of the Century,” 18–20, and “Gran escandalo en el Palacio de Bellas Artes,” 1. It has also been reconstructed and analyzed by historians. See Tibol, Documentación sobre arte mexicano, and González Cruz Manjarrez, La polémica Siqueiros-­Rivera. 60. Eisenberg, “Battle of the Century,” 18. 61. Ibid. 62. Rivera’s arguments were subsequently written up and published in an essay entitled “Raíces políticas y motivos personales de la controversia Siqueiros-­ Rivera. Stalinismo vs. Bolchevismo Leninista” in Octubre, December 1935, and reprinted in Rivera, Obras, textos polémicos, 87–103. 63. Ibid., 103. 64. Eisenberg, “Battle of the Century,” 20. 65. A transcript of the nine points of agreement is reprinted in González Cruz Manjarrez, La polémica Siquiros-­Rivera, 161. My translation from original Spanish: “El arte ha servido más a los intereses demagógicos del gobierno que a los intereses de los campesinos y obreros,” and “Ha sido un error realizar los murales casi exclusivamente en el interior de los grandes edificios.” 66. Ibid. 67. While both artists claimed a position from within Marxism, it is important to recall that neither was officially a member of the Communist Party at the time. Both had been expelled and both were seeking a rapprochement with the international Left. While Siqueiros was busy attacking Rivera’s Trotskyism, leftist party members were accusing him of the same sins. Emanuel Eisenberg lampoons both artists in his account of the polemic for the New Masses. As an official member of the American Communist Party, he viewed Siqueiros as similarly bourgeois in his aesthetic individualism and equally opportunistic in his attempts to ally himself with the lear. See Eisenberg, “Battle of the Century,” 20. 68. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 19. 69. Bertram Wolfe would treat both this mural and Rivera’s cycle at the sep as illustrations for his two histories, Portrait of America and Portrait of Mexico. In

202   Notes

both cases he narrates these histories as though they are historical travelogues through the Americas, using Rivera’s cycles as guiding structure. Wolfe, Portrait of America. 70. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 19. 71. Siqueiros, “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-­ subversiva,” lecture delivered at the John Reed Club in Hollywood, California, 2 September 1932, reprinted in Tibol, David Alfaro Siqueiros. In Los Angeles, he experimented with collective production and modern techniques for executing murals on the exterior walls of buildings. In Buenos Aires, he explored his interest in visual movement and photography in a “plastic exercise,” and in New York, he established the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, where he would continue to experiment with industrial paints and techniques while also producing portable works. 72. I am using the English translation by Dwight MacDonald from the fall 1938 issue of Partisan Review, reprinted in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 483–87. 73. Ibid., 484–85. 74. Ibid., 485. 75. Ibid., 484. 76. Ibid., 485. 77. Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 77. 78. Ibid., 80. 79. For the most complete analysis of the collaborative dynamics at work in this project, see Jolly, “Art of the Collective.” 80. Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 80. 81. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 82. Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 95. 83. Jolly, “Art of the Collective.” 84. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 18. 85. The process of political moderation is typically attributed to the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46). Through a combination of personal attributes and political contingencies, Ávila Camacho was able to unite right-­wing and left-­wing factions within the ruling party (now called the Party of the Mexican Revolution). Similarly, he smoothed over relations with the United States, which had been strained after Cárdenas nationalized the petroleum industry, and re-­established relations with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. For a detailed discussion of avilacamachismo and Mexico in the 1940s, see Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 75–148.

86. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 159–98. 87. See Rochfort, Mexican Muralists, 227, and Híjar, “David Siqueiros, New Democracy,” 94–96. 88. Siqueiros reserved the term “mural” for works like Portrait of the Bourgeoisie. This designation had nothing to do with materials but rather referred to the spatial complexity of the work and the way that it was integrated into the architecture. A “large work,” on the other hand, referred to a single painting, regardless of scale or materials, in which the subject matter was presented in an iconic way. These were less dynamic and thus less political because they could be read like traditional painting. Regardless, he did not disparage his “large works.” Rather, he saw them as addenda to his mural projects. Rochfort, Mexican Muralists, 193. 89. Siqueiros’s system of polyangular perspective is characterized by three elements: (1) it uses three-­ dimensional architectural spaces—as opposed to flat walls—as a representational space; (2) it addresses an active—as opposed to passive—spectator; and (3) it modifies the painted figure to accommodate various angles of observation—as opposed to a single preferred point of view. Itala Schmelz, “De la perspectiva a la poliangularidad,” in Siqueiros, Siqueiros, 75. 90. For a discussion of the problem of portrait and allegory in Mexican muralism, see Anthony Lee’s analysis of Rivera’s Allegory of California mural in Painting on the Left, 57–86. 91. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 17. 92. Siqueiros, “Nuestra acción y su inercia: Primera réplica del Centro de Arte Realista Moderno,” El Popular, 17 August 1944, reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 232–34. 93. Krauze, Mexico, 526–600. 94. González Villegas, “The National Institute of Fine Arts,” 100. 95. See Palacio de Bellas Artes. 96. Chávez, Discurso, 24. 97. Ibid., 14. My translation from original Spanish: “las numerosas y variadas actividades estatales, están calculadas para preservar la existencia, y para hacer las vidas de los ciudadanos, más seguras, más saludables, mejores, y más bellas.” 98. Ibid., 17. 99. Ibid., 18. My translation from original Spanish: “es el medio más efectivo de vinculación de los individuos de la colectividad, de elevación de las normas

éticas, de expresión de las inquietudes individuales y colectivas, de comunicación general, y de fortalecimiento de la personalidad nacional.” 100. Ibid., 23. My translation from original Spanish. 101. Ibid., 35 (my emphasis). My translation from original Spanish: “Al iniciarse este Museo, y al irse desarrollando, en el futuro, empezará a tomar cuerpo, a hacerse tangible, a ponerse al alcance de todos, una expression mexicana, auténticamente mexicana, y al mismo tiempo de auténtico valor universal.” 102. Debroise, “The Mandarin,” n.p. 103. Palacio de Bellas Artes, 60. 104. Palacio de Bellas Artes, 60. 105. Gamboa/Rivera. 106. For an example of the exhibition in one of its traveling iterations, see Gamboa, Master Works of Mexican Art from Pre-­Columbian Time to the Present. For a chronicle of Gamboa’s curatorial career, see Festival de formas en homenaje a Fernando Gamboa. 107. For a discussion of the cultural cold war, see Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism”; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; and Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. 108. For a discussion of how the political opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union affected cultural discourse in Latin America, see Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 21–121. 109. Siqueiros, “Nuestra acción y su inercia: Primera réplica del Centro de Arte Realista Moderno,” El Popular, 17 August 1944, reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 232–34. 110. Interview with Siqueiros published in El Tiempo, 31 August 1951, cited in Rochfort, Mexican Muralists, 192. 111. Ibid. 112. See Vazquez, “Translating 1492.” 113. McClintock, Imperial Leather. 114. Quoted in Debroise, “The Mandarin,” n.p. 115. Olivier Debroise has demonstrated that Gamboa’s approach to Mexican art was deeply informed by Paul Westheim’s cosmopolitan formalism. Westheim’s scholarship on pre-­Columbian and modern art was based in the German aesthetic theory of Wilhelm Worringer. He took an essentially aesthetic and ahistorical approach to antiquity. Debroise’s arguments about Gamboa are indebted to Carlos Molina’s research. For his discussion of the development of Gamboa’s curatorial strategies, see Molina, “Fernando Gamboa y su particular versión de México.”

Notes  203

116. This episode has been covered by Bertram Wolfe and by Rivera himself. See Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 386–90, and Rivera, My Art, My Life, 167– 73. 117. Reyes Palma, “Los dilemas de un mural.” 118. Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road,” 18. 119. Reyes Palma, “Los dilemas de un mural,” 7. 120. Rivera, My Art, My Life, 168. 121. Reyes Palma, “Los dilemas de un mural,” 12–13. 122. After it was installed briefly at the Palace of Fine Arts, the mural disappeared and is now considered lost. Rivera claims that Chávez and Gamboa conspired to cut the image from its support, and his account has contributed to the mystery surrounding its fate. However, photographs taken by Lola Álvarez Bravo and published by Francisco Reyes Palma reveal that the mural was carefully rolled up under Rivera’s supervision after he reached an agreement with Chávez. It is certain that it toured Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Democratic Republic of Germany, and Czechoslovakia before going permanently to China, at which point it disappeared. 123. Barnett Newman, “The Painting of Tamayo and Gottlieb,” La Revista Belga, April 1945, reprinted in O’Neil, Barnett Newman, 76. 124. Debroise, “Reaching Out to the Audience.” 125. Siqueiros, “Saludable presencia del arte mexicano en la viciada atmósfera de París,” reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 378–92. 126. Ibid., 388–89. 127. Ibid., 390–91. 128. Ibid., 391. My translation from original Spanish: “en este material . . . no hay neutralidad possible para el Estado.” 129. Genauer, “Liberation of Mexican Mural Art.” 130. Bambi [Cecilia Treviño de Gironella], “Yo no soy el Cuarto Grande.” My translation from original Spanish: “Ni soy cuarto, ni soy grande. . . . Soy el primero de una nueva modalidad de la pintura mexicana que trata de tener una voz universal, en lugar de limitarse a esa pinture chauvinista que bien podriamos llamar ‘la Escula de Huipanguillo.’” 131. Breton and Trotsky, “Manifesto” (1938), in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 485. 132. Charlot, “Rufino Tamayo,” 138. 133. For one of Tamayo’s earliest published critiques of mural art and nationalist indigenismo, see Tamayo, “El nacionalismo y el movimiento pictorico.” 134. Cardoza y Aragon, La nube y el reloj.

204   Notes

135. Medina, “La oscilación entre el mito y la crítica,” n.p. 136. The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings was originally published in Spanish in 1950, expanded in 1959, and translated and published in English in 1961. 137. Paz, “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” 23. 138. Ibid., 26. 139. Ibid., 27. 140. Ibid., 28. 141. Paz, Eagle or Sun? 111–13. 142. Paz, “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” 32. 143. Ibid., 32. 144. Ibid., 33. 145. Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, 37–44. 146. Paz, “Tamayo in Mexican Painting,” 30. 147. Ibid., 33. 148. For a more elaborated argument about Tamayo’s career as a muralist, see Coffey, “‘I’m Not the Fourth Great One.’” 149. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism. 150. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 86. 151. Ibid., 87. 152. Ibid., 77. 153. Ibid., 80. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., 87. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid., 88. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. Paz, “Repaso en forma de preámbulo” (1986), in México en la obra de Octavio Paz, vol. 3, Los privilegios de las vista, 29, cited in Medina, “La oscilación entre el mito y la crítica,” 9. 162. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, 27. 163. For a detailed description of la confrontación, see Goldman, “La pintura mexicana en el decenio de la confrontación.” 164. Salazar, “The Cuevas ‘Mafia’s’ Mexican Mural Revolt.” 165. Cuevas, “The Cactus Curtain,” 120. 166. Rodríquez, “Nuevo mural de Camarena en Bellas Artes.” 167. Ibid. 168. Cordero Reiman, “Narraciones corpóreas e incorporaciones en los murales de Bellas Artes,” 67, 80.

Chapter 2: A Patriotic Sanctuary 1. Article 30 in the Ley Orgánica del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, published originally in El Diario Oficial, 3 February 1939, reprinted in Ley orgánica del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1–18. 2. José de Jesús Núñez y Domínguez, “Discurso pronunciado por el señor profesor don José Jesús Núñez y Domínguez, director del Museo Nacional de Historia, en la ceremonia inaugural del mismo,” reprinted in Vázquez Olvera, El Museo Nacional de Historia en voz de sus directores, 27–34. 3. Ibid., 34. 4. Ibid. 5. Velasco Arriaga, “Chapultepec es el santuario de la patria,” 18. My translation from original Spanish: “Chapultepec es el santuario de la patria, y su altar es el Museo . . . allí vive y crece la conciencia cívica del pueblo mexicano.” 6. Benjamin, La Revolución. 7. Ibid. 8. Guide of the National Museum of History, Castle of Chapultepec, 11. 9. Krauze, Mexico, 6–8. 10. Castro, “Y el Museo Nacional de Historia Donde?” 11. Arellano Z., “25 años del Museo Nacional de Historia,” 1. My translation from original Spanish: “El presidente Cárdenas entendió que era precio que un lugar tan importante para la historia del país, fuera disfrutado por todos y no sólo por un grupo de privilegiados.” 12. Jaime Torres Bodet, “Discurso pronunciado el día de la inauguración del Museo,” quoted in Vázquez Olvera, El Museo Nacional de Historia en voz de sus directores, 30. My translation from original Spanish: “Nos hemos congregado hoy no como funcionarios o periodistas, como civiles o militares, como artistas o historiadores, como colegiales o catedráticos, sino ante todo— y sobre toda otra consideración—como mexicanos. Es decir: como hijos que se dan cita en una de las casas más venerables de la familia histórica nacional, a revisar los valores de un patrimonio que por igual a todos nos pertenece, a respirar el aire de nuestros héroes.” 13. Benjamin, La Revolución, 69. 14. Ibid., 117–36. 15. Krauze, Mexico. These are the titles of the first three chapters. 16. Ibid., 17. Krauze is quoting from Sierra, Evolución política del pueblo mexicano, 228–31.

17. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 18. Anderson, “Narrating the Nation,” 659. 19. La Saint-­Barthélemy was an anti-­Protestant pogrom launched in 1572; the Albingensian massacres were campaigns for the extermination of that population from the zone between the Pyrenees and the Alps instigated by Pope Innocent III. 20. Feminist engagements with Anderson are legion. Here I cite only a few. See McClintock, Imperial Leather; Yuval-­Davis and Anthias, Woman-­Nation-­ State; and Zacharias, “Trial by Fire.” 21. Stevens, Reproducing the State, 50–101. 22. Ibid., 49. 23. Michael Warner, “Van Winkle Family Values,” csst working paper, University of Michigan, cited in ibid., 14. 24. Krauze, Mexico. 25. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. 26. Ibid., 88 (my emphasis). 27. Ibid., 87. 28. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 160–61. 29. Ibid., 161. 30. Quoted in ibid. 31. The golden age refers to the classic period of Mexican cinema production, but as Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov argue, it has been expanded to encompass other culture industries during the period between 1940 and the 1960s. Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov, “Assembling the Fragments,” 9. 32. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 161. 33. The organization of the museum at this time can be discerned from official guide books, which reproduce photographs of each of the galleries, list the objects on display, comment on the significance of these artifacts, describe the didactic point of each exhibition, and provide schematic drawings of the organization of the museum as a whole. Guide of the National Museum of History, Castle of Chapultepec. 34. Plaque at entrance of museum, quoted in ibid., 8. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Ibid., 18. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., 51. 39. Ibid., 81. 40. Ibid., 60. 41. Ibid., 65–68. 42. Ibid., 91–99.

Notes  205

43. Hooper-­Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. 44. Ibid., 168. 45. Ibid. 46. The museum is still divided into two floors. As in the beginning, the first floor is still dedicated to national history, receiving the majority of visitor attention, while the second floor is relegated to a variety of cultural displays and temporary exhibitions. The difference now is that history is no longer synonymous with militarism, and that visual art is the primary vehicle for communication on both floors. 47. Soto Soria, “Modern Museology in Mexico,” 33. 48. The different reorganizations have been chronicled in the interviews with successive directors in Vázquez Olvera, El Museo Nacional de Historia en voz de sus directores. The decision to organize the narrative around the Juárez presidency is noted in Negrete, César, and Cottom, inah. An intermediary installation from the 1960s can be discerned in Museo Nacional de Historia–Castillo de Chapultepec. 49. De La Parra, “Razones impalpables para que el Colegio Militar Vuelva a Chapultepec.” 50. Castro, “Y el Museo Nacional de Historia Donde?” 51. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “Pasó ya la época de los señoritos aristocratizantes enfundados en un uniforme militar, que vestidos por el puebla y educados a costa del pueblo, sólo aprendían a sirvir mejor a los déspotas para someter a ese pueblo.” 52. Velasco Arriaga, “Graves daños originaría el Cambio del Museo Nacional de Historia del Castillo de Chapultepec.” 53. Casillas, “El Museo de Historia y Chapultepec.” 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Interview of Silvio Zavala by Carlos Vázquez Olvera, in Vázquez Olvera, El Museo Nacional de Historia en voz de sus directores, 41. My translation from original Spanish: “yo había observado en la planta baja, en la parte histórica, que había unos ciertos desequilibrios entre la riqueza del material de unos momentos y la pobreza de otros. La historia de México ha pasado por agitaciones muy fuertes, dolorosas; por tanto, ocurría que, precisamente en las etapas de calma y de paz, todos los objectos y las obras de arte prosperaban y se podían reunir con más facilidad; eso producía el desequilibrio al que me refiero. Unos aspectos y épocas quedaban muy fuertemente representados y después

206   Notes

decaían. Ahora, para corregir en cierto modo eso, para compensarlo, tuve la idea . . . de introducir los frescos en las galerías del museo.” 57. Larrauri and Miguel, “Iker Larrauri en México,” Punto, 17 October 1983, excerpted in Schmilchuk, Museo, 354. My translation from original Spanish: “la intención de crear conciencia histórica, de consolidar la identidad nacional por medio de planteamientos didácticos de lo que era la cultura nacional; y didácticos no solo en el sentido de mostrar los productos de esa cultura sino también los procesos que los generan.” 58. Miller, Technologies of Truth, 216–44. 59. Ibid., 216. 60. Ibid., 217. 61. Ibid., 236. 62. Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, 131. 63. Stacie G. Widdifield has written an excellent and detailed account of this period and the ways Mexican artists attempted to deflect international disdain for this “barbaric” act by emphasizing scenes of deliberation and conciliation. See The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-­Century Mexican Painting, 32–77. 64. For a discussion of the complex race relations that resulted from Juárez’s presidency as well as his marriage to a Creole woman, see ibid., 122–64. 65. Ibid., 32–77. 66. O’Gorman, “El Retablo de la Independencia,” in Luna Arroyo, Juan O’Gorman, 259–60. My translation from original Spanish: El Retablo do la Independencia es una pintura mural que tiene, dentro del Museo de Historia, varias funciones específicas: a.) Trata de exponer en síntesis, al pueblo de México, los acontecimientos históricos que hicieron posible el nacimiento de la nacionalidad. b.) Trata de reconstuir visiblemente la memoria del pueblo con si propósito de coordinar en la mente del observador, el pasado con las posibilidades de un futuro mejor. c.) Trata de explicar los fenómenos sociales que hacen posible el devenir histórico.

67. O’Gorman, “Autobiografía,” reprinted in Luna Arroyo, Juan O’Gorman, 106. My translation from original Spanish: “poder expresar en la forma más clara y verdadera, amor por todo lo que existe en el mundo material.” 68. Even though the congress approved and ratified

the Declaration of Independence in 1816, the fighting did not end until 1821. 69. My translation from original Spanish: “Con la abolición de castas La Revolución de Independencia sirvió de union a los criollos, mestizos, indios, negros y mulattos. Asi en nuestra Patria no existe la discriminación racial.” 70. Alamán, Episodios históricos de la guerra de Independencia. 71. For a description of this, see “El Retablo de la Independencia,” El Tiempo, 19 September 1960, reprinted in O’Gorman, La palabra de Juan O’Gorman, 316–17. 72. Ibid., 317. My translation from original Spanish: “La documentación histórica de que se ha valido Juan O’Gorman para realizar su mural la proporcionó el Museo Nacional de Historia; una extensa iconografía de todos los retratos y dibujos que existen en el museo y que corresponden al periodo histórico de la Independencia.” 73. There are many more examples of the use of details from famous historical murals as objects in regional and municipal history museums throughout Mexico. For a discussion of this, see Coffey, “Mural Art and Popular Reception.” 74. Contract for mural commission, 14 January 1957, Sala Siqueiros archive, document number 11.2.91. 75. Mario Orozco Rivera served as chief to a team of assistants that included Luis Arenal, Carlo Quattrucci, Sixto Santillan, Epitacio Mendoza, Adolfo Falcon, Electa Arenal, Angeles Gil, Ernesto Bautista, Roberto Díaz, Francisco Magallón, Fabian Coral, and Julio Estrada. Nicolas Bernal helped with the iconography. Julio Miranda served as carpenter, and José Gutiérrez was the chemist. 76. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 7. 77. Krauze, Mexico, 587. 78. Arredondo Zambrano, “Modernity in Mexico,” 94. 79. Ibid., 96. 80. Rivera worked on the stadium, Siqueiros the rector’s tower, O’Gorman the main library, Chávez Morado the auditorium in the science complex, and Eppens the medical department. With the exception of Siqueiros, all the artists were followers of Rivera. Since 1952, the campus has been enhanced by many more mural commissions within and outside its many buildings. See Guía de murales de la Ciudad Universitaria. 81. The “Plastic Integration” of the 1950s was articulated as a critique of the art deco style that pre-

dominated in the academy during the first half of the twentieth century. The artists working at the cu saw their integration of painting and architecture as an advance beyond the sculptural adornments of their predecessors such as Carlos Obregón Santacilia’s Monument to the Revolution. See Méndez-­Vigatá, “Politics and Architectural Language”; O’Gorman, “Hacia un integración plástica realista en México,” reprinted in Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan O’Gorman, 121–23; and Siqueiros, “Hacia una nueva plástica integral,” Espacios, September 1948, reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 287–92, and “Plastic Integration in the University City,” reprinted in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution, 99–101. 82. See Siqueiros, “America Tropical: Primer mural exterior de nuestro movimiento pictórico mexicano en Los Angeles, California,” and “Ponencia sobre el muralism figurative y realist en el exterior,” Arte Público, December 1952, reprinted in Siqueiros, Siqueiros, n.p. 83. Quoted from the transcript of the nine points of agreement, reprinted in González Cruz Manjarrez, La polémica Siquiros-­Rivera, 161. 84. Both artists would eventually concede the aesthetic and communicative failures of their cu projects. O’Gorman would agree with Siqueiros’s aesthetic criticisms of his library mosaics, and Siqueiros would argue that his murals were lacking for want of advanced technology. See “Autocrítica del edificio de la Biblioteca Central de la Ciudad Universitaria,” archival document published in O’Gorman, La palabra de Juan O’Gorman, 163–64, and Siqueiros, “Mi experiencia en el muralismo exterior,” Excélsior, 25 March 1956, reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 408–14. 85. O’Gorman, “En torno a la integración plástica,” in Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan O’Gorman, 93. 86. O’Gorman, “Sobre la arquitectura en México,” in Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan O’Gorman, 111–14. 87. Ibid. 88. Villegas Moreno, “Los ‘éxtasis’ del pasado,” 157. 89. Siqueiros, “Mi experiencia en el muralismo exterior,” Excélsior, 25 March 1956, reprinted in Tibol, Palabras de Siqueiros, 408–14. 90. Siquieros, “Ponencia sobre el muralismo figurativo y realista en el exterior,” Arte Público, December 1952, reprinted facsimile in Siquieros, Siqueiros, n.p. 91. Siqueiros, “Bad Architecture Second to Bad Painting,” lecture delivered to the Society of Architects, 9 October 1953, excerpted in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution, 208.

Notes  207

92. Siqueiros, “Aunque la gringa se vista de China poblana, gringa se queda,” originally published in an unknown newspaper, 21 December 1952, facsimile reprinted in Siqueiros, Siqueiros, n.p. 93. O’Gorman, “El Retablo de la Independencia,” in Luna Arroyo, Juan O’Gorman, 260. My translation from original Spanish: “A muchos pintores y críticos modernos les parece el Retablo de la Independencia es un “calendario” fotográfico (a pesar de que no hubiera sido posible realizarlo por medios fotográficos, ni siquiera como fotomontaje) . . . se trataba fundementalmente de una obra de carácter didáctico y su realización requería más que otra cosa una correcta interpretación con respecto al gusto popular del mexicano. Como autor de este mural es mi mayor deseo el haber hecho una pintura que tenga la aprobación del pueblo de mi país, pues de esta manera puedo pagar con mi trabajo a quienes con su trabajo hacen posible mi existencia como hombre y como mexicano.” 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Cárabaes Pedroza, Mi libro de tercer año. 97. Ibid., 7. 98. Ibid., 106. 99. Ibid., 18–19. 100. Ibid., 107–12. 101. Ibid., 14–15. 102. Ibid., 122–24. 103. This is Toby Miller’s term from The Well-­ Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject. 104. Siqueiros, “Mi experiencia en el muralismo exterior,” reprinted in Tibol, Art and Revolution, 408–14. 105. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 165–66. 106. Ibid., 185–86. 107. Ibid., 186. 108. Krauze, Mexico, 635. 109. Ibid. 110. Siqueiros, “Plastic Arts and Revolution in Latin America,” extracts from a lecture at the Caracas Central University, Venezuela, 9 January 1960, reprinted in Tibol, Art and Revolution, 183. 111. Ibid., 184. 112. Rivera’s mural had been covered up by the government for fear that it would offend tourists from the United States, who made up the hotel’s main clientele. Rivera had included the phrase “God does not exist: the universe is governed by its own laws” next to a painted portrait of Ignacio Ramírez, its nineteenth-­

208   Notes

century author. Siqueiros claims that the hotel capitulated to pressure from Mexican government officials, who worried that the mural would give the impression that the state tolerated “Bolshevism.” Ibid., 184. 113. Ibid., 186. 114. Ibid., 188. 115. Ibid., 189. 116. Poniatowska, “Entrevista a Siqueiros,” 16–24, 41–49. 117. While Siqueiros was at work on this project, several critics pointed out that the mural’s theme was a thinly veiled argument in favor of “social dissolution.” At the time no one seemed to miss the point. See, for example, Canaday, “Siqueiros.” 118. Siqueiros, “Pintura activa para un espectador activo,” presentation at the National History Museum on 18 November 1966, transcribed and published in El Gallo Ilustrado, supplement to El Día, 11 December 1966, reprinted in Tibol, Art and Revolution, 439. My translation from original Spanish: “El tema está subordinado, nautralmente, a la función museológica.” 119. Ibid (my emphasis). My translation from original Spanish: “realizara la obra comprendí que tendría que hacer algo como solo el movimiento muralista mexicano ha sido capaz de producir: una gran pintura documental con retratos de personajes cuyo parecido debía ser lo más apegado a la verdad que fuera posible.” 120. Ibid., 440. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid., 443. 123. Ibid., 444. My translation from original Spanish: “En esta Sala de la Revolución no habrá sillas ni bancos para sentarse; eso es propio de museos donde el público se coloca frente a un cuadro de Juan o frente a un cuadro de Enrique y permanence largo tiempo observándolo. Un mural tiene que hacer caminar al espectador, tiene que movilizarlo, porque en una plataforma amplia toda superficie se vuelve activa, y quien la observa debe entrar en actividad, actividad física y actividad espiritual.” 124. Ibid. 125. Anon., “Pintura.” 126. Carr, “The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State,” 344. 127. Ibid., 341. 128. Ibid., 345. 129. Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, 142. 130. Carr, “The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State,” 343.

131. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 480, cited in ibid., 343. 132. For a brief discussion of Camarena’s work for the free-­textbook program, see Rodríguez Luévano, “La patria,” in La arquelogía del régimen, 67–69. 133. Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, 142. 134. Quoted from an interview of Felipe Lacouture y Fornelli by Carlos Vázquez Olvera in Vázquez Olvera, El Museo Nacional de Historia en voz de sus directores, 69. My translation from original Spanish: “el muralism antes de ser arte es mensaje, mensaje histórico-­político-­ social y público, que se logra con arte, y es obra de arte, pero arte por añadidura. Pero con la enorme fuerzo del arte de los grandes maestros, los murales sobrepasan a la presentación de objetos en forma visual tan fuerte, que acaban por imponerse no como valores didácticos únicamente, sino en sí mismos como obras primordiales en el museo.”

Chapter 3: The Womb of the Patria 1. President López Mateos’s words have been emblazoned on the lobby wall at the National Museum of Anthropology. My translation from original Spanish: “El pueblo mexicano levanta esta monumento en honor de las admirables culturas que florecieron durante la era precolombiana en regiones que son, ahora, territorio de la republica. Frente a los testimonios de aquellas culturas el México de hoy rinde homenaje al México indigena, en cuyo ejemplo reconoce caracteristicas esenciales de su originalidad nacional.” 2. Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow.’” 3. Rene Hajeu, José A. Mora, and Eugene and Bussiere, “Comments about the National Museum of Anthropology,” correspondence files at the Pedro Ramírez Vázquez archives. 4. Philip Johnson, Time, 25 June 1865, clipping in “Comments about the National Museum of Anthropology,” correspondence files at Pedro Ramírez Vázquez archives. 5. Sir Philip Hendy, “Comments about the National Anthropology Museum,” correspondence files in Pedro Ramírez Vázquez archive. 6. Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 6. 7. Ibid. 8. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 212. 9. Ibid., 322. 10. Ibid., 323, 324.

11. Ibid., 265. 12. Morales Moreno, “History and Patriotism in the National Museum of Mexico,” 174. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. The term “exhibitionary complex” is Tony Bennett’s from The Birth of the Museum. He uses the term to encompass a broader phenomenon than museums alone. It also includes world’s fairs and expositions, as well as any attempt to exhibit cultures, races, or “others” to a wide public. For discussions of Mexican antiquities within the Western exhibitionary complex, see Aguirre, Informal Empire; Braun, Pre-­Columbian Art and the Post-­Columbian World; and Tenorio-­Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs. 16. Solis, “El Museo Nacional de Antropología y su historia,” 33. 17. Morales Moreno, “The National Museum of Mexico,” 177. 18. Ibid., 175. The history of the National Anthropology Museum is well rehearsed. See Morales Moreno, Orígenes de las museología mexicana (a special issue of Alquimia on “El Museo Nacional en el imaginario mexicano”), and Vargas Salguero, “Museo Nacional de Antropología.” 19. See Tenorio-­Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs. 20. Morales Moreno, “The National Museum of Mexico,” 182. 21. Ibid., 185. 22. Justo Sierra quoted in Vargas Salguero, “Museo Nacional de Antropología,” 43. My translation from original Spanish: “tengo fe en que la próxima vez que el Congreso de Americanistas se reúna en México, celebrará sus sesiones en un edificio espléndido, destinado por el gobierno federal a la guarda de nuestras colecciones arqueológicas y de nuestras reliquías; los planos están listos y los recursos prontos.” 23. Ramírez Vázquez, Ramírez Vázquez en la arquitectura, 41. 24. Krauze, Mexico, 657. 25. Ramírez Vázquez, Ramírez Vázquez en la arquitectura, 42. My translation from original Spanish: “quisiera que fuera tan atractivo, que la gente pregunte a algún pariento o amigo: ¿ya fuiste al museo?, igual que ¿ya fuiste al teatro? Quisiera que los mexicanos al salir de él se sientan orgullosos de serlo.” 26. Ibid., 659. 27. Ibid., 660–63. 28. Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow,’” 169.

Notes  209

29. Ibid., 163–68. 30. Marquina and Aveleyra, Consejo de planeación e instalación del Museo Nacional de Antropología, 1. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. Ibid., 54. 33. Ibid. 34. “Museo Nacional de Antropología, del instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia inaugurado el 17 de septiembre de 1964,” ix. 35. See, for example, inah Anteproyecto del Programa Nacional de Museos. 36. “Museo Nacional de Antropología, del instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia inaugurado el 17 de septiembre de 1964,” ix–x. My translation from original Spanish: “una necesaría lección para el pueblo: de hacer de ellos una enseñanza y un espectaculo que muestra el pasado, no para calcarlo, sino para aprender de él y fincar nuestro futuro en la inspiración que puede brindarnos.” 37. Ibid., 42. 38. Ibid., 46–48, 75. 39. Ibid., 59. 40. Ibid., 52. 41. Ramírez Vázquez, Ramírez Vázquez en la arquitectura, 62. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Rodríguez Prampolini, “Rivera’s Concept of History.” 46. Ibid., 63. 47. See García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, and Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. 48. Bernal, The Mexican National Museum of Anthropology, 14. 49. Vasconcelos, “The Race Problem in Latin America,” 92–100. 50. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 30. 51. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 194. 52. See Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, 291–301, and Gilman, Difference and Pathology. 53. This and all subsequent claims about the Synthesis of Mexico gallery are quoted from a synopsis of the museum’s exhibitions published in Bernal, The Mexican National Museum of Anthropology, 193. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid.

210   Notes

57. Ibid., 193. 58. Ibid. 59. My translation from the original Spanish: “En tanto que permanzca el mundo, no acabará la fama y la Gloria de México-­Tenochtitlán.” 60. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art, 176. 61. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 123. 62. Ramírez Vázquez, Ramírez Vázquez en la arquitectura, 73. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “El efecto subjectivo que el conjunto produce en el público lo induce a bajar la voz e ingresar a la sala con respetuosa actitude, lo cual muestra, una vez más, la profunda influencia que el espacio arquitectónico ejerce sobre la disposición y el estado de ánimo de sus usuarios.” 66. “Discurso del Dr. Jaime Torres Bodet, secretario de educación pública.” My translation from original Spanish: “La raíz es la explicación del tronco, el tronco la de la rama, la rama la de la flor.” 67. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “Avanzamos, por la afirmación de lo nacional, hacia la integración de lo universal.” 68. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “los hombres de aquellos pueblos supieron fijar en piedra las estaciones, convertir en deidades coléricas o indulgentes a los elementos de la naturaleza, e imaginaron robustecer el vigor del Sol con ofrendas y sacrificios, animándole a proseguir el combate del día contra la noche, hasta el punto de que la aurora—para los últimos defensores de aquel mundo teocrático e imperial—resultaba, más que un triunfo de la luz sobre las tinieblas, una Victoria, tan humana como divina, de la vida sobre la muerte.” 69. Ibid., xvi. My translation from original Spanish: “Muchas de las obras que este museo conserva equivalen a una apologia espléndida de la muerte.” 70. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “Sin embargo, ese mismo sentido se encuentra ahora envulto en fervor de vida, pues el destino como fatalidad, nuestro pueblo quiere oponer el destino que se hace todos los días con el trabajo, en la independencia y en la virtud.” 71. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “Frente a Coatlicue . . . nos inclinamos en dolorosa arrobo; pero sentimos que, si ‘la muerte está en la existencia cual la semilla en el fruto,’ existencia y muerte

se compenetran, para los individuos y las naciones, en torrents de eternidad.” 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. He explains, “But the silence of Cuauhtémoc resounds still. In silence we Mexicans heard him while living. Until the utmost of that silence so eloquent forms a profound part of our life, it is like the bronze shield of our hearts and the honorable resistance of our being.” My translation from original Spanish: “Pero el silencio de Cuauhtémoc resuena aún. En silencio lo escuchabamos, los mexicanos, mientras vivimos. Hasta el extremo de que silencio tan elocuente forma parte profunda de nuestra vida, es como escudo de bronce de nuestras almas y resistencia honrañable de nuestro ser.” 74. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 84. 75. Ibid., 84. 76. Ibid., 86. 77. “Discurso del Dr. Jaime Torres Bodet, secretario de educación pública,” xvi. My translation from original Spanish: “La ceremonia que nos reúne lo confirma admirablemente: Cuauhtémoc no murió en vano. Junto a los restos de lo que fue . . . perseverante, atrevido y fiel. Al honrar los vestigios de su pasado, ese México tiene la convicción de que honra en su propio [illegible word] en la universal, el prestigio de su presente y la gloria de su pasado.” 78. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “La primera—puramente estética—obedece requerimiento de presentar al espectador la obra del pasado, en la soledad de su pristine desnudez.” 79. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “La segunda . . . Es didactica, sobre todo. Importa que le estudioso comprenda (hasta donde parezca factible, dada la limitación de nuestro saver) el sentido social de las obras que lo cautivan.” 80. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “nuestro país constituyo un puente entre las culturas latina y sajona del Nuevo Mundo. Por los orígenes de su población, es un Puente histórico entre las tradiciones americanas precolombinas y las europeas del orbe mediterráneo. Y, tanto por su posición en la esfera terrestre cuanto por la sinceridad de su comprensión para todos los horizontes del hombre, México puede ser asimismo un Puente—un Puente de verdad, de condorida y de paz—entre los pueblos que ven la aurora antes que nosotros y los pueblos que, después de nosotros, miran nacer el Sol.”

81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “Las culturas, para durar, requieren una infrangible alianza entre la espiritualidad y el dominio técnico. Ante los testimonios de tantas civilizaciones paralizadas, nos prometemos solemnente no incurrir jamás en deslealtad para los altos designios que postulamos, ni en renuncia frente al esfuerzo de adaptación que reclama, en lo material, la preservación de los ideales que esos designios implican.” 83. For a discussion of the circumstances women faced in the mural movement and the Greenwood sisters’ ability to transcend them, see Oles, “The Mexican Murals of Marion and Grace Greenwood.” 84. Ramírez Vázquez, Ramírez Vázquez en la arquitectura, 75. 85. Tamayo, “El nacionalismo y el movimiento pictorico,” 280. My translation from original Spanish: “Francia nos da el ejemplo actual de la excelencia de esta manera de obrar. Laboratorio maravilloso donde se buscan constantemente nuevos caminos para el arte y en donde sin buscarlo se da a la pintura una cara absolutamente francesa.” 86. Cardoza y Aragón, La nube y el Reloj, 62. My translation from original Spanish: “Su pintura es mexicana porque nuncas se ha preocupado de hacerla mexicana, sino de bien pintar.” 87. Cuevas, “The Cactus Curtain,” 117. 88. For the most definitive study of artists from the generation of la Ruptura, see Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change. 89. For examples of the existentialist turn of postwar art criticism, see Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, or Rodman, The Insiders. 90. The description of the new “global” themes being treated by artists during and after World War II as “tragic and timeless” comes from Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman’s statement, published in Edward Alden Jewell’s review “‘Globalism’ Pops into View.” 91. Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, 205–15. 92. For discussion of this myth, see Bierhorst, History and Mythology of the Aztecs. 93. De Neuvillate, introduction to Arte contemporaneo en el Museo Nacional de Antropología, 21. 94. Sanchez, “Mathias Goeritz,” 144. 95. Ibid., 146. 96. Ibid. 97. Luis Enrique Pérez-­Oramas, “Mathias Goeritz’s Messages Number 7B,” 121.

Notes  211

98. Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 97. 99. Ibid. 100. See Rodríguez Prampolini on surrealism in Mexico in El surrealismo y el arte fantástico de México. 101. William Holland, “Conceptos cosmológicos Tzotziles como una base para intepretar la civilizacíon Maya Prehispánica,” América Indigena, 24 (1964), 14, cited in Astor Aguilera, “Survey of Talking Cross Shrines in Yucatán and Quintana Roo.” 102. Ibid. 103. Almere Read and Gonzalez, Mesoamerican Mythology, 198. 104. Ibid. 105. Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 97. 106. Ibid., 32. 107. Andres, A Dictionary of Nature Myths, 104. 108. Carrington, “Down Below,” 195, quoted in Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 49. 109. Aberth, Leonora Carrington; Bradley, Movements in Modern Art; and Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. 110. Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 62. 111. An Essential Guide: National Anthropology Museum, 224. 112. Goldwater, Primtivism in Modern Art. 113. Medina, “Gerzso and the Indo-­American Gothic,” 213. 114. Medina, “Gerzo and the Indoamerican Gothic,” 213. 115. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 29–31. 116. Ibid., 65–88. 117. Ibid., 172–73. 118. Ibid., 205, 208. 119. Ibid., 208. 120. Ibid., 212. 121. For a discussion of Latin American national allegories as expressions of the crisis of masculinity, see Biron, Murder and Masculinity. 122. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 197. 123. Ibid., 148. 124. Octavio Paz, “Tamayo in Mexican Painting.” 125. For a discussion of how Tamayo strategically exploited his Indian status, see Indych-­López, “‘None of Those Little Donkeys for Me.’” 126. Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow,’” 169–70. 127. Ibid., 170.

212   Notes

128. Ibid., 173–74; Solin, “Mexico ’68,” 3. 129. Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow,’” 176–79. 130. The history of the events that led up to the massacre is well rehearsed in a large body of literature. My summary of events has been culled from Eric Zolov, “Protest and Counterculture in the 1968 Student Movement in Mexico”; Donald Mabry, “The Mexican Government and Student Conflict,” 131–38; Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico; Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices. 131. For examples of cnh propaganda, see Grupo Mira, La Gráfica del ’68. 132. Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices, 113. 133. Ibid. 134. Frazier and Cohen, “Defining the Space of Mexico ’68.” 135. Carey, “Los Dueños de México.” 136. La Gráfica del ’68. 137. Vázquez Mantecón, “Visualizing 1968,” 38. 138. Ibid., 38–39. 139. Ibid. 140. García de Germenos, “The Salón Independiente,” 49–50. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 50. 143. Ibid., 50. 144. See Zolov, Refried Elvis. 145. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 215. 146. Ibid., 236. 147. Ibid., 278. 148. Ibid., 284. 149. Ibid., 298. 150. Ibid., 323. 151. Ibid., 324. 152. Ibid., 322. 153. Ibid., 264. 154. Ibid., 265. 155. Ibid., 266.

Conclusion 1. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, 264. 2. Cuevas press conference quoted in Salazar, “The Cuevas ‘Mafia’s’ Mexican Mural Revolt,” 1. 3. For a full discussion of the political, economic, and

cultural context of this commission, see Folgarait, So Far from Heaven. 4. Salazar, “The Cuevas ‘Mafia’s’ Mexican Mural Revolt,” 48. 5. For a discussion of the paradoxical effects of the so-­called Echeverría opening, see Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, 199– 250; Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices, 153–88; Frazier and Cohen, “Defining the Space of Mexico ’68,” 651–60; Shapira, “Mexico.” 6. Bartra, “The Mexican Office,” 6. 7. See Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta, and Martínez and Puig, Políticas culturales de México. 8. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 135. 9. Martínez and Puig, Políticas culturales de México, 67. 10. inah Anteproyecto del Programa Nacional de Museos, 7. 11. Ibid., 8. My translation from original Spanish: “los museus ha sido mas una secuencia cronológica de sucesos y hechos aislados, ilustrada por objetos artisticos, que una reflexión sobre las continuidades y rupturas de la formación histórica y social de México.” 12. Ibid., 9. My translation from original Spanish: “Hoy se acepta el hecho de que México es una nacion multietnica y pluricultural con diversos y contradictorios desarrollos historicos regionales, y que esa pluralidad y diversidad es la que ha caracterizado la formación histórica de la sociedad mexicana. En los tiempos actuales es necesario que los museos divulguen estos nuevos conocimientos, que propongan nuevas soluciones para expresar correctamente esos fenomenos, y que fomenten la necesidad de víncular el pasado con el presente.” 13. Ibid., 16. My translation from original Spanish: “No funcionan como centros culturales dedicados a satisfacer las demandas plurales de su entorno social ni mantienen una relación solida con su medio cultural.” 14. See Ramos Galicia, “Museo y comunidad,” 41; Departamento de Museos Comunitarios, “El museo comunitario.” 15. Coffey, “From Nation to Community.” 16. Yudicé, The Expediency of Culture. 17. Eder, “El público de arte en México.” 18. Bourdieu, Darbel, and Schnapper, The Love of Art. 19. Eder, “El público de arte en México,” 55. My translation from original Spanish: “En México existe desde

los años veinte un fantasma denominado arte público, que en algunas raras instancias, gracias al apoyo de Vasconcelos, pudo cobrar real existencia en manos del movimiento muralista.” 20. Ibid., 65. My translation from original Spanish: “El análisis de los datos parciales de esta investigación representa un intento por conocer al público de arte en México, sus actitudes y opinions en relación a distintos movimientos artísticos, su conceptualización del arte y su posible receptividad frente a movimientos de vanguardia que proponen un cambio en la experiencia estética.” 21. Ibid. 22. Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta. Their survey involved submitting questionnaires to the visitors of four different art exhibitions: a retrospective of a famous foreign artist, Henry Moore; a retrospective of a famous Mexican artist, Diego Rivera; a group show of industrial arts; and a thematic show, the traveling exhibition of Tina Modotti’s and Frida Kahlo’s art curated by Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey. 23. Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta, 209. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 210. 26. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 97. 27. Cimet, Dujovne, García Canclini, Cullco, Mendoza, Reyes Palma, and Soltero, El público como propuesta, 214. My translation from original Spanish: “Los criterios de la función social, especialmente los del nacionalismo y las culturas autóctonas, que tuvieron un fuerte papel en el desarrollo de la plástica, y en general, de la cultura en Mexico, parecen haber contribuido más a formar el gusto y las opiniones de los espectadores que la concepción de las bellas artes.” 28. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 97–99. 29. Ibid., 100–106. 30. Molinar, “Los museos del inba.” 31. In addition to the two portraits of Best Maugard, paintings by Abraham Ángel, Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Julio Castellanos, Miguel Covarrubias, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and Francisco Goitia were on display. 32. Cordero Reiman, “Dos configuraciones de modernidad,” 12–18.

Notes  213

33. Ibid., 18–21. 34. Cordero Reiman, “Fuentes para una historia social del ‘arte popular’ mexicano,” 32. 35. Personal correspondence, 25 January 2003. 36. A concise description of the exhibition’s history and intentions is relayed by Debroise in the introduction to the resultant catalogue, Modernidad y modernización en el arte mexicano, 19–25. 37. Primitivism refers to the exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984. Octoberish refers to October, an art journal known for its neo-­ Marxist and critical theoretical orientation. 38. Personal correspondence, 25 January 2003. 39. An exemplary case in point is the rich “Pinceles de la Historia” series published in conjunction with a series of exhibitions detailing the cultural production of the Mexican nation-­state from the Spanish viceroyalty to the postrevolutionary era at Mexico’s National Museum of Art from 2000 to 2003. Each catalogue has multiple authors, but the principal authors are Jaime Cuadriello for the colonial period, Fausto Ramírez and Ester Acevedo for the period of independence, and Renato Gonzalez Mello for the twentieth century. See El origen del reino de la Nueva España, De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana, La fabricación del estado, and La arqueología del regimen. 40. Personal correspondence, 25 January 2003.

214   Notes

41. Iturbe, Monsiváis, and García Canclini, Quimera de los murales del Palacio de Bellas Artes. 42. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. 43. Cordero Reiman, “Narraciones corpóreas e incorporaciones en los murales de Bellas Artes.” 44. García Canclini, Quimera de los murales del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 32–43. 45. Ibid., 43. My translation from original Spanish: “Del escalón más bajo de complejidad—el de los estudiantes obligados a ver los murals ‘para hacer la tarea’— al de los especialistas, públicos formados o que buscan en las guías habladas o leídas algo más que anécdotas, las obras de los muralistas peranecen como una matriz histórica multifacética, un repertorio denso de temas e imagines.” 46. Ibid. My translation from original Spanish: “la diversidad de expectativas y disposiciones de comprensión reveladas cuando escuchamos a los públicos, muestra que una sola línea de diffusion y comunicación avanzarían con un conocimiento más extenso y desglosado de los motives y capacidades con que diferentes sectores socials se acercan a los testimonios de la historia y a los palacios del arte.” 47. Miller, Technologies of Truth, 233. 48. Ibid., 236. 49. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 239–403. 50. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 206–63.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market, 149 Alameda Park (Mexico City), 23, 27, 30, 169, 192 Alemán, Miguel, 13, 26, 30, 49–53, 76, 109, 171, 200 n. 24 Allegory of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (Solares), 87 Amour, Inés, 159 Anderson, Benedict, 82–84, 88 Anguiano, Raúl, 148–49 anthropology, 23, 92–93, 140–42. See also National Anthropology Museum architectural space: citizenship and, 114–19; muralists’ use of, 21, 32, 36, 80, 92, 102, 109–14, 118–19, 122, 129, 201 n. 38; museum design and, 133–39; power symbolism and, 29–30 Arenal, Angelica, 49 Arenal, Luis, 44 art: education and, 2, 20–21, 28, 41–42; gendered viewers and, 32, 49, 149; independence from politics and, 64–67, 72, 76–77; indigenous, 7; instrumentalizing of, 14–16, 19, 21–24, 28–29, 41, 114–15, 122–26, 155; Mexican School, 5, 63–64, 129, 148, 180; Modern Man primitivism and, 7, 67, 70–72, 82, 141, 158, 165–67, 174–77; politicizing of, 1–6, 13–14, 16, 22, 25–26, 38, 44, 49–50, 60–64, 129–30, 180; protests of 1968 and, 169; reception theories and, 2, 43, 74, 78, 184–86, 190–91; revolutionary impulse and, 4, 12, 41, 65; total works of, 119, 155–59, 180. See also mural artists Art of This Century Gallery, 3 “Arts and Their Revolutionary Role in Culture, The” (Rivera), 40 “Arts in Mexican Schools, The” (session), 40 Asociación Nacional de Actores (anda), 120–21 Avendaño, Roberta “la Tita,” 169 Aztecs, 53, 60, 70, 113, 130–31, 138–47, 152, 165–66, 173–75 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 3 Barta, Roger, 4–6, 11–12, 18–19, 129, 182, 197 n. 15

Basilio, Norma Enriqueta, 167 Bauhaus, 155–59 Belkin, Arnold, 92, 150 Benjamin, Thomas, 79–81 Bennett, Tony, 16–17, 19, 141, 209 n. 15 Berlin Peace Accords, 57, 60 Bernal, Ignacio, 140, 142 Birth of Our Nationality (Tamayo), 67, 68–69, 70, 75 Birth of the Museum, The (Bennett), 209 n. 15 Boari, Adamo, 27 Bodet, Jaime Torres, 45, 81, 132–34, 145, 147, 152, 166 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16, 184, 198 n. 68 Brangwyn, Frank, 35–36, 200 n. 35 Brenner, Anita, 1 Breton, André, 43, 64–65, 76, 159 Butler, Judith, 16 “Cactus Curtain, The” (Cuevas), 5, 11, 18, 24, 74, 150 Calaveras of the National Mausoleum (Méndez), 29, 29 calendar stone, 130–31 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 12–13, 25, 34, 38–39, 50, 76–78, 84, 177 Camacho, Manuel Ávila, 13, 85, 120, 202 n. 85 Camarena, Jorge González, 25, 73–75, 79, 92–98, 107, 124, 140–42, 148; images and prints of, 74, 95–96 Camín, Héctor Aguilar, 84–85 Campa, Valentín, 119–20 Campesinos (Mexiac), 149 Campos, Jorge Hernández, 188 Cananea Consolidated Copper Mine strike, 107, 121 Canclini, Néstor García, 124, 143, 182, 186, 190, 192 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 12–14, 39, 45, 50, 78, 81, 84–85, 103, 202 n. 85 Cardoza y Aragón, Luis, 65, 150 Carey, Elaine, 169 Carr, Barry, 122 Carranza, Venustiano, 27, 95, 104 Carrillo, Lilia, 172 Carrington, Leonora, 148, 159–63, 160–61, 164, 172, 175

Casauranc, José Manuel Puig, 12 Castañeda, Quetzil, 21 Castro, Fidel, 168, 171 Catharsis (Orozco), 33, 67, 70, 151, 200 n. 28 Catholicism, 66, 82, 94, 102, 135, 144–46, 154–55, 159, 162, 186 Center of Realist Modern Art, 49, 53, 112 Cézanne, Paul, 187 Chapultapec Park (Mexico City), 23, 78, 79, 80–82, 89–92, 120, 133, 168 Charlot, Jean, 1, 65 Chávez, Carlos, 51, 55–57, 60–63, 76 Chávez, Tomás, 109, 135, 136–37, 138, 145, 148, 152 Chimera of the Murals at the Palace of Fine Arts (­exhibition), 190 citizenship: architecture and, 114–19; gender and, 32, 34, 54–55, 82–83; museums and, 2, 78–79, 89–90, 92–94, 100, 117, 138–45, 177, 190, 192; reproductivity and, 37, 54–55, 82–83 Ciudad Universitaria (cu), 50, 108–9, 112, 116–18, 135, 138, 207 n. 80, 207 n. 84 Cloud and the Clock, The (Cardoza y Aragón), 150 Coatlicue (monolith), 130–31, 144–47 Cold War, 26, 49–53, 56–57, 60–63, 122, 132 Colección Jumex, 20 colonialism: gender and, 37, 67–72, 75, 82–84, 144–45; Mexican mythologies and, 82, 86–88, 90, 127–28, 135, 167 Communist Party, 12, 38–40, 45, 57, 202 n. 67 Confrontation ’66!, 73 Consejo Nacional de Huelga (cnh), 168–69 Constitution of 1917, The (González Camarena), 94–95, 96 Coordinación Nacional de Exposiciones y Eventos Temporales del conaculta, 189 Coronel, Rafael, 148, 150, 152–55, 152, 163–64, 172, 175 Cortés, Hernan, 7, 8, 9, 53–56, 93, 146 Cortines, Adolfo Ruiz, 89–90 Cosmic Race, The (Vasconcelos), 6–7, 140 Covarrubias, Luís, 148 Craven, David, 12–13 Creation (Rivera), 198 n. 44 Crisol (journal), 150 Cristero War, 37 Cuauhtémoc (prince), 53–56, 94–96 Cuauhtémoc against the Myth (Siqueiros), 53 Cuban Revolution, 132–33, 168, 171 cubism, 64, 121, 187 Cuevas, José Luis, 5, 11, 18, 22, 24, 73–74, 149–50, 171–72, 180–81 Curare (group), 190

228   Index

Dalí, Salvador, 159 Dana, John Cotton, 3 Darbel, Alan, 184 de Beauvoir, Simone, 166 Debroise, Olivier, 51, 188–90, 201 n. 58, 203 n. 115 de Kooning, Willem, 73 de la Madrid, Miguel, 188 de la Torre, Graciela, 189 Díaz, Porfirio, 25–31, 34, 81, 85–87, 107–8, 121, 123, 131 discourse theory, 19–20 Duality (Tamayo), 151, 152 Duchamp, Marcel, 3 Duncan, Carol, 32 Echeverría, Luís, 170, 181 Eder, Rita, 184–85, 190 education, 9, 12, 25, 40, 51, 79, 116–17, 122 n. 69, 124, 142; art-­citizenship relation and, 2, 20–21, 28, 78, 88, 184, 186; museums and, 85, 89–109, 119–26, 128, 132–34, 179, 182–84, 186. See also Secretaría de Educación Pública Effective Vote—No Re-­election (O’Gorman), 123, 124 Ehrenberg, Felipe, 172 Eisenberg, Emanuel, 40 Eisenstein, Sergei, 44 Electricians’ Syndicate, 13, 43–44, 46, 119, 134 Engels, Friedrich, 39 Ephemeral Mural No. 1 (Cuevas), 73–74, 180–81 Epic of American Civilization (Orozco), 169 Eppens, Francisco, 109 Errington, Sherry, 143 Escobedo, Helen, 172 Estrada, Arturo, 148, 154–55, 154, 164 Estridentistas (group), 29 eugenics, 37. See also race; reproductivity Excélsior (publication), 29, 63 Experimental Workshop (of Siqueiros), 43 fascism, 32–33, 37, 44, 49–50, 65, 75, 120 Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos, 168–73 Felguérez, Manuel, 148, 150, 171 feminism, 11–12, 34, 82, 159–63, 205 n. 20. See also ­gender fertility myths, 165–67, 174, 179. See also reproductivity fiber arts, 155–59 Fishermen (Mexiac), 149 Folgarait, Leonard, 15–16, 198 n. 62 Force, Juliana, 3 Foucault, Michel, 17–20, 198 n. 62, 199 n. 71 Fourth International, 36, 39–40, 44, 201 n. 49 Frazier, Lessie Jo, 169

Frente a Frente (publication), 29, 29, 38–39, 76 Friedeberg, Pedro, 150 From Porfirianism to the Revolution (Siqueiros), 104–9, 104–6, 107, 110–11, 123 Fusion of Two Cultures, The (González Camarena), 94, 95 Galería Historia, 132 Gamboa, Fernando, 51–63, 76, 148, 177, 186, 190, 203 n. 115 gender: citizenship and, 32, 34, 54–55, 82–83; colonialism and, 37, 67–70, 75, 143–45; ideal viewer and, 49; Mexican landscape and, 37, 49; Modern Man primitivism and, 70–72, 165–67; mural artists and, 8–12, 49, 54–55, 149, 159–63; nationalism and, 9–11, 55, 71–72, 82, 166, 169–71, 176–77, 179–80, 201 n. 42; race and, 54–55, 70–72, 83–84, 129–30, 141, 144–45, 201 n. 42; representations of mestizaje and, 7, 8, 9–10, 94, 144–46, 174–76; revolution’s depiction and, 96, 106–7; student protests and, 167–72. See also reproductivity; women genealogy, 19–20, 199 n. 71 Gerzso, Gunther, 172 Gil, Emilio Portes, 12 Gironella, Alberto, 150 Gods of Life and Death (Anguiano), 149 Gods of the Modern World (Orozco), 169 Goeritz, Mathias, 148, 150, 155–59, 156–57, 163–64 Goldman, Shifra, 3–4, 13, 72–73 Goldwater, Robert, 164 governmentality, 17, 24, 192 Goya, Francisco, 151, 166 Gramsci, Antonio, 18 “Great Dream, Modernity and Modernization in Mexican Art” (exhibition), 189 Great Silent Demonstration, 168 Greenberg, Clement, 62, 65, 179 Greene, William C., 107, 121 Guernica (Picasso), 62, 67, 73–74, 180 Guerrero, Vicente, 102 Guggenheim, Peggy, 159 Guston, Philip, 73 Harris, Neil, 2–3 hegemony, 15–16, 18, 182–84, 186 Hill of the Virgin and the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina, in Juquila, The (Estrada), 154 historia patria, 78–99, 103, 109–19 history: gendering of, 82–84, 165–67; historia patria, 78–99, 103, 109–19; methods of, 19–20, 182–84, 199 n. 71; Mexican political mythology and, 6–12, 53–56, 60–63, 66, 71, 88, 93, 149; Modern Man primitiv-

ism and, 7, 67, 70–72, 75, 82, 141, 158, 165–67, 174–77, 181–84; mural art and, 77–79, 87, 98–102, 109–26 History of Mexico (O’Gorman), 112, 113, 138 Hitler, Adolf, 38 Homage to the Indian Race (Tamayo), 60, 61, 67 Hooper-­Greenhill, Eileen, 88 Huerta, Victoriano, 81 Huipanguillo (school), 63–64, 72 Humanity Freeing Itself (González Camarena), 74, 75 Humboldt, Alexander von, 130–31 Hurlburt, Laurence, 1 Icaza, Francisco, 150, 171 inah (National Institute of Anthropology and History), 78 Independence (O’Gorman), 103, 123 indigenismo, 7, 12, 27, 40, 60, 65–66, 115–17, 150, 164, 175, 199 n. 8 Indo-­American Gothic, 164, 175 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (inba), 51–52, 75, 172, 183, 189 Inter-­American Biennial, 73 Iturbide, Augustín de, 103 Izquierdo, María, 149 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 150 Johnson, Philip, 128 Jolly, Jennifer, 44 Juárez, Benito, 82, 88, 97–98, 192 Juárez and the Reform (Orozco), 97–98, 98 Kahlo, Frida, 11, 149, 159 Kazuya Sakai, 172 Kennedy, John F., 132–33 Kiesler, Frederick, 3 Kline, Franz, 73 Krauze, Enrique, 81–82, 84 labor unrest, 107, 119–22, 168–73 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 65, 70–72, 84, 164–67, 173–74 Laclau, Ernesto, 192 Larrauri, Iker, 23 lear (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios), 29, 41, 51 Leja, Michael, 67 Lenin, V. I., 37–38, 40 Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (lear), 29, 41, 51 Linsley, Robert, 37 Louvre, Musée du, 134 Lovestone, Jay, 39 Lozano, Manuel Rodríguez, 25, 75–76

Index  229

Madero, Francisco I., 81, 104, 123–24 Magical World of the Maya, The (Carrington), 159, 160–61 Malinche (figure), 7, 8, 9, 71, 146–47, 165, 174 Man at the Crossroads (Rivera), 35, 35, 37, 70 Man Controller of the Universe (Rivera), 35 Manrique, Jorge Alberto, 186 Mao Tse-­tung, 57 March of Humanity (Siqueiros), 180 March of Loyalty, The (O’Gorman detail), 125 Marin, Lupe, 49 Mariscal, Federico E., 28 Martínez, Oliverio, 30, 81 Marx, Karl, 39, 107 Marxism: ideology theory and, 18, 20, 66; Internationalism and, 26–32, 36, 42–44, 197 n. 1; student protests and, 169–70 Mateos, Adolfo López, 14, 103, 116, 120–21, 127, 132–33, 149, 164, 177 Matisse, Henri, 53, 200 n. 35 Maugard, Adolfo Best, 5, 166, 186–87 Maximato, 12, 14, 26–34, 37, 39, 50, 60, 76 Maximilian (emperor), 80, 85, 87, 97–98 Maya, 135, 138–40, 159–63, 160–61, 174 McClintock, Anne, 55 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 65, 164 Méndez, Leopoldo, 29, 29, 38–39, 76, 169 Mendiolea, Raúl, 170 Mendoza, Francisco de P., 87, 97 Mérida, Carlos, 148, 172 mestizaje, 23, 82–84, 131–32, 187; mural art’s mythologies of, 6–12, 19, 60, 67–70, 94, 138–45, 150, 179–80, 187; National Anthropology Museum and, 127–31, 133–45, 151–55; Paz on, 174–76; race and, 6–12, 19, 37, 64–72, 94, 127–30, 138–46, 150–63, 174–76, 182–84; Tamayo’s development of, 64–70, 151–52 Mestizaje (González Camarena), 140 Method of Drawing (Best Maugard), 5, 187 Mexiac, Adolfo, 148–49, 158–59, 164, 171 Mexica gallery, 143–44 “Mexican curio” (style), 43, 45, 114, 164, 176–79 Mexican Miracle, 85, 103, 109–22, 128, 132, 165 Mexican Revolution, 45, 65, 78–82, 84–85, 90–91, 140–42, 173–76 Mexico: art audience of, 184–85; art’s instrumentalizing in, 14–16, 19, 25–28, 41, 50–56, 62–64, 72, 78, 95–98, 122–26, 149; authoritarianism in, 1, 12, 30–31, 39; capitalism in, 3–6, 13, 34, 107, 109; Catholicism in, 66, 82, 94, 102, 135, 144–46, 154–55, 186; citizen-­ subjects of, 14–17, 34, 78, 93–94, 100, 138–45, 177, 190–92; colonial history of, 33–34, 37, 47–48, 53–56,

230   Index

79, 82, 84, 86–88, 90, 93, 112–13, 127–28, 130–33, 135, 167; Communist Party in, 38–39; Constitutional Congress (1917) in, 79, 95, 96; cultural diplomacy of, 51–53, 57, 60–64, 66, 70–73, 76, 116, 148; educational system in, 9, 12, 21, 25, 28, 40, 51, 79, 116–17, 122 n. 69, 124, 132, 142; feminized representations of, 11, 49, 67, 71, 163–67, 171; French intervention in, 80, 97–98; historia patria of, 78–99, 103, 109–19; iconography of, 27, 75, 102, 113–14, 123, 145; illiteracy in, 40, 42; mestizaje identity in, 6–12, 19, 23, 60, 64–72, 82–84, 94, 127, 130–45, 150–63, 174–76, 187; Mexico School, 5; modernization of, 20–24, 27, 31, 45, 50–53, 65, 72, 116–17, 128–29, 131, 133, 141, 143, 165– 67, 173–76, 192; museums’ utility and, 2–3, 21–24, 49–53, 77–79, 122–26, 128, 131, 148–49, 164–67, 172; patriarchal kinship structures in, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 32, 34; Plan de San Luis Potosí, 123; pre-­Columbian cultures in, 7, 8, 9, 53, 60, 70, 113, 130–47, 152, 165–66, 173–75, 182–84; state patronage in, 1–2, 7, 11–14, 22, 92, 181, 200 n. 25; strikes and labor unrest in, 107, 119–22, 168–73; tourist economy in, 20–21, 34, 40, 50, 180, 208 n. 111; War of Independence, 86; War of the Reform, 82. See also mural artists; revolution; Secretaría de Educación Pública México, Años 20, 188 Mexico City, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 127, 167–73, 180, 184 Mexico for Democracy and Independence (Siqueiros), 45 Mexico Today (Tamayo), 67, 70, 75 Meyer, Lorenzo, 84 Meza, Guillermo, 171 Miller, Toby, 19, 93, 114, 192 Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública): inba and, 51, 189; institutional function of, 21, 28, 40; murals in, 9, 79; patronage of, 12, 25, 112, 122, 202 n. 69; textbook production and, 116, 124 Modern Autochthonous Mexico (display), 142 modernism: architecture and, 133–39; European, 11, 53; Mexico’s relation to, 27, 53, 113, 113 modernity: gendering of, 9–10, 82–83; liberal government and, 18, 82–84; Mexican art as emblem of, 50, 60, 65, 189, 192; Mexican industrialization and, 13, 17, 25, 31, 45, 50–53, 85, 109; mythological past and, 60–63, 127–29, 133–49 “Modernity and Modernization in Mexican Art” ­(exhibition), 189 Modern Man primitivism, 67, 70–72, 82, 141, 158, 165–67, 174–77, 181 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 134 Monsiváis, Carlos, 20, 190

Montenegro, Roberto, 25, 75–76, 187–88 Monument to the Revolution (Obregón Santacilia and Martínez), 30, 81, 207 n. 81 Morado, José, 109, 135, 136–37, 138, 145, 148, 152 Morelos y Pavón, José María, 100–101, 103 Moreno, Nicolás, 148–49 mural artists: architectural elements of, 20, 32, 36, 80, 102, 109–14, 118–19, 122, 207 n. 80; dialectical approach of, 42–44, 53–57, 122–23, 187, 191; didacticism of, 2, 14, 20–24, 41–42, 51, 92–109, 114, 122–26, 129, 186–92; discourse theory and, 20; feuds among, 32–43, 57, 65, 114–15, 124, 149, 202 n. 59; gender and, 8–12, 49, 54–55, 149, 159–63; generational schisms among, 63–64, 67–79, 148, 158–59, 171, 175–76, 180; independence of, 73–77; instrumentalizing of, 14–17, 25, 31–43, 76, 79–80, 114, 122–26; international style of, 113–14; “Mexican universal” notion and, 51–53, 66, 74, 129, 140, 145; museums and, 2–3, 17, 21–23, 87–89, 91–92, 120–23, 129, 149, 179–80, 186, 190; narrative forms and, 40, 87–89, 98–101, 103–9, 122–23, 129; as official artists, 2–3, 7, 11–14, 22, 76, 86–88, 92, 127–41, 159, 172, 181, 188–89; photo projection and, 45, 53, 104–5; revolutionary impetuses of, 4, 15, 25–26, 31–39, 41, 66, 103–9, 167–73; Ruptura generation and, 148, 150–59, 171, 175–76, 180; sacralization of, 14, 22, 25–27, 53; socialist orientation of, 27, 32–51, 56–57, 64, 75–76, 112–15, 120; in United States, 12, 31, 34–35, 42–43, 45, 97, 169 Mural of Independence (O’Gorman), 99, 100–101, 114, 121 Murdoch, Peter, 168 Musée de l’Homme, 128, 134, 187 Museo de Arte Popular, 20 Museo de la Ciudad de México, 132 Museo de la Ciudad Juárez, 132 Museo del Estanquillo, 20 museology: authoritarian experimentalism and, 2, 88; didacticism and, 133–39, 182–84, 186–92; Mexico’s developments in, 92, 129, 144; mural art and, 22–23, 85; National Anthropology museum and, 128–29, 177, 182; National History Museum and, 89–90. See also architectural space Museo Nacional de Arte (munal), 186–92 Museo Nacional del Vierreinato, 132 Museo Soumaya, 20 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 3, 51–52, 186 museums: anthropological approach and, 23, 78, 92–93, 127–28; architecture and, 114–19, 158; citizenship and, 2–3, 17, 22, 78–79, 93–94, 100, 121, 138–45, 177, 181, 190, 192; design of, 133–39; didacticism of, 85, 92–109, 119–26, 128, 132, 134, 179, 182–84, 186–92,

209 n. 15; origins of, 88; ritual aspects of, 138–45; state patronage and, 2–3, 22, 76, 86–88, 127–30, 132– 41, 159, 172, 188–89; truth production and, 19–20, 78, 122–26 Mussolini, Benito, 38 mythology: art and, 5–6, 15, 60–63, 66, 71–72, 75–76, 129, 151–59, 190; feminism and, 159–63; fertility myths and, 165–67, 174, 179; institutional use of, 12–13, 15, 146; of mestizaje, 6–12, 19, 60, 67–70, 94, 138–45, 150, 179–80, 187 National Anthropology Museum: criticism of, 24, 127, 130, 182; mestizo nationalism and, 127–33; muralism in, 23, 73, 98–109, 122, 148–67; photos of, 128, 135–37, 143; primitivism and, 164–67, 174–76; purposes and history of, 130–34, 146, 148, 151, 167, 172; Tlatelolco massacre and, 129–30, 173–77 National Art Museum (munal), 186–92 National Committee of Expositions and Temporary Events, 189 National Council of Culture and the Arts, 189 National Federation of Technical Students, 168–73 National Gallery of Art, 184 National History Museum: early exhibition problems and, 91–92; founding and purpose of, 80–92, 124– 26, 132, 206 n. 46; muralism in, 23–24, 79–80, 103–9, 126, 129, 149–50, 179–80; photos of, 86; Porfiriato’s attestation to civilization and, 85–87; telling technology and, 77–80, 122–26, 179 National Institute of Anthropology and History (inah), 78 National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (inba), 51–52, 75, 172, 183, 189 nationalism: culture’s relationship to, 4–5, 17, 21, 90; French, 82; gender and, 9–11, 55, 71–72, 82, 166, 169–71, 176–77, 179–80, 201 n. 42; muralists’ work and, 51–53, 93–94, 115–16, 122, 126; race and, 100– 102, 127–30, 144–46; reproductivity and, 37, 54–55, 83 “Nationalism and the Pictorial Movement” (Tamayo), 150 National Military Academy, 80, 89 National Museum, 20–21 National Museum of Archeology, History, and Ethnography, 131 National Museum of Art, 51, 214 n. 39 National Museum of Natural History, 131 National Preparatory School, 7 National Railroad Workers Trade Union, 119–22 National Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), 1, 25, 39, 50, 174–75, 188–89 National Strike Council, 168

Index  231

Newark Museum, 3 New Democracy, The (Siqueiros), 45, 46, 49, 53, 55, 57, 75 Newman, Barnett, 62, 64 New Masses (publication), 39–40, 202 n. 67 New York City, 31, 34–36, 40, 181 Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace, The (Rivera), 56–57, 58–59 Nissen, Brian, 172 North American Conference of the New Education Fellowship, 40 Nube y el reloj, El (Cardoza y Aragón), 150 Obregón, Álvaro, 1, 12, 81, 187 Obregón Santacilia, Carlos, 30, 207 n. 81 official culture, 3–6, 126, 129, 174–77, 179, 190–92; historia patria, 78–99, 103, 109–19 O’Gorman, Juan, 79–80, 92, 98–119, 121–26, 138, 142, 180, 207 n. 84; works of, 113, 124–25 O’Higgins, Pablo, 148–49 Oles, James, 13 Olympic games, 14, 127, 167–73, 180 Ordaz, Gustavo Díaz, 169–71, 181 Orozco, José Clemente: Catharsis, 33, 67, 70, 151, 200 n. 28; commissions of, 13, 25, 31–38, 41, 52, 73, 169; death of, 56; Epic of American Civilization, 169; Hernan Cortés and “la Malchine,” 7–8; Juárez and the Reform, 97–98, 98; National History Museum work of, 79, 92; Paz on, 66; Rivera’s feud with, 32–38, 149; self-­imposed exile of, 14, 31, 169–70 “Other Mexico, The” (Paz), 173 Palace of Fine Arts: construction of, 25, 29–30; cultural significance of, 5, 63, 75–76; exhibition practices of, 51–53, 129; as Kunsthalle, 23, 52; murals of, 14, 27, 36–38, 63–64, 67–70, 74, 149, 186, 190; National Museum of Art and, 51; photographs of, 26 Palace of Legislative Power, 30, 81 Palacio, Carlos Riva, 29, 39 Palau, Marta, 172 Palma, Francisco Reyes, 24, 29, 57, 204 n. 122 Palomares, Fernando, 107 Pani, Alberto J., 27–28, 30, 200 n. 24 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri), 1, 25, 39, 50, 174–75, 188–89 patronage, by state, 1–2, 7, 11–14, 22, 92, 181, 200 n. 25 Paz, Octavio: art’s depoliticizing and, 64; gender and, 165–67; Mexican modernity and, 41, 70–72, 76, 80, 146, 164; official art and, 1, 3–4, 15, 27, 78, 80, 97, 122, 127, 146, 151, 176; Tamayo and, 64–67; Tlatelolco massacre and, 24, 130, 173–76, 179, 182 People to the University, the University to the People, The (Siquieros), 114, 115, 118

232   Index

Picasso, Pablo, 62, 67, 73–74, 180–81, 200 n. 35 Plan de San Luis Potosí, 123 politics: aestheticizing of, 1, 14, 26, 44, 49–50, 64, 113–15, 129–30, 180; art’s independence from, 64–67; didactic exhibition and, 20–24, 67, 92–109; political culture and, 4–5, 12–15 Pollock, Jackson, 64, 121 Polyform Cultural Siqueiros, 119, 180 Popular Graphic Workshop (Taller de Graphica Popular), 148, 158–59, 169 Porfirian Feudalism (O’Gorman), 125 Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (Siqueiros), 13, 43–45, 203 n. 87 Posada, José Guadalupe, 107, 169 Postdata (Paz), 24, 130, 173–76, 182 power, 17–20, 29–30 Prado, Nadine, 148 Prieto, Miguel, 44 primitivism, 7, 67, 82, 141, 158, 164–67, 174–77, 181–84 prostitution trope, 33–34, 70–72, 107 Rabel, Fanny, 44, 148, 171 race: gender and, 54–55, 70–72, 83–84, 129–30, 141, 144–45, 201 n. 42; mestizaje identity and, 6–12, 19, 37, 64–72, 94, 127–30, 138–46, 150–63, 174–76, 182–84; O’Gorman and, 114; revolution’s depiction and, 6–12, 96, 98, 100–102, 106; scientific racism, 36; Tamayo and, 65–66, 151–52; women’s reproductivity and, 37 Ramírez, Luis Cueto, 170 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 43 Raull, Regina, 148 realism, 43, 49–50, 53–60, 73, 112. See also social ­realism reception theories, 2, 43, 74, 78, 184–86, 190–91 Reiman, Karen Cordero, 26, 76, 187 Renau, Josep, 44 reproductivity, 37, 55, 70–72, 82–83, 129–30, 141, 165– 67, 201 n. 42 Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc (Siqueiros), 53, 55, 60 revolution: contradictions of, 15, 25, 190–92; critiques of, 109–19; gender and, 9, 10, 106–7; as impetus for mural artists, 4, 15, 25–26, 31–39, 41, 66, 103–9, 167–73; institutionalizing of, 27–32, 51–53, 131; mestizaje mythology and, 6–12, 100–102, 106, 174–76; Mexico’s official discourse and, 1, 81–85; mural art and, 31, 95–96, 103–9, 138, 141; museums’ relation to, 20–26, 123–26, 138; Siqueiros on, 119–22. See also Marxism ritual, 21, 138–45 Rivera, Diego: censorship and, 35–36; Creation, 198 n. 44; CU work of, 109–19; death of, 92; Hotel Prado mural of, 120; international appeal of, 53, 200

n. 25; Man at the Crossroads, 35, 35, 70; “Mexican curio” style and, 43, 45, 114, 164, 176–79; Mexican national mythology and, 22, 37; The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace, 56, 58–59; official commissions of, 1, 12, 25, 29, 31–41, 44, 52, 73, 122, 202 n. 69, 204 n. 122; Orozco’s feud with, 32–38, 149; Our Bread, 9–10; Paz on, 66, 74; Portrait of America, 42; self-­imposed exile of, 14, 76, 97; Siqueiros’s feud with, 38–43, 57, 65, 114–15, 124, 202 n. 59; social realism of, 2, 21, 33, 35, 56–57, 60, 64–65, 75–76, 79–80, 87, 92–93, 122–23, 129, 149, 159, 180, 187, 201 n. 38; Trotskyism of, 36, 38–40, 44, 57, 202 n. 67 Rivera, Mario Orozco, 171 “Rivera’s Counter-­revolutionary Road” (Sisqueiros), 39–40 Rochfort, Desmond, 1 Rockefeller, Nelson, 35–36, 200 n. 35 Rockefeller Center, 31, 35, 40, 97, 200 n. 25 Rodman, Selden, 151 Rodríguez, Abelardo, 12, 29 Romero, Carlos Orozco, 73 Rosenberg, Harold, 66, 151, 179 Rothko, Mark, 64 Rubio, Pascual Ortiz, 12 Ruptura generation, 148–59, 171, 175–76, 180 Salón Indipendiente, 172 Salon of Mexican Plastic Arts, 171 Santa Anna Theater, 27 Secretaría de Educación Pública (sep): inba and, 51, 189; institutional function of, 21, 28, 40; murals in, 9, 79; patronage of, 12, 25, 112, 122, 202 n. 69; textbook production and, 116, 124 Sentimientos de la nación (Morelos y Pavón), 101 Sert, José Maria, 35–36, 200 n. 35 Siempre (publication), 89 Sierra, Justo, 82, 132 Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarileros de la Republica Mexicana, 119–22 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 103, 107; Center of Realist Modern Art and, 49–50, 53; March of Humanity, 180; “Mexican curio” and, 176–77, 179; Mexican Miracle and, 119–22; Mexico for Democracy and Independence, 45; National History Museum work of, 79–80, 98, 120–23, 129, 179–80; nationalism of, 53–56, 73; The New Democracy, 45, 46, 49, 53, 55, 57, 75; O’Gorman’s dispute with, 109–19; Palace of Fine Arts work of, 25, 44–45, 49, 52, 73; Paz on, 66, 74; The People to the University, the University to the People, 114, 115, 118; political activism of, 119–22, 176–77, 180, 186; From Porfirianism to the Revolution, 104–9, 104–6, 107, 110–11, 123; Portrait of the Bour-

geoisie, 13, 43–45, 203 n. 87; Resurrection of Cuauhtémoc, 53, 55, 60; Rivera’s feud with, 38–43, 57, 65, 114–15, 124, 202 n. 59; Tamayo’s criticism of, 62–63; techniques and experiments of, 42–43, 45–46, 50, 57, 121, 129, 150, 191, 203 n. 88, 207 n. 84; Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 53, 54, 169; Tropical America, 109; Trotsky assassination attempt and, 45, 62; Victim of Fascism, 45–46, 48; Victims of War, 45–46, 47 Slim, Carlos, 20 Smithsonian Institution, 128 social realism: Cold War and, 57, 60, 62–63; descriptions of, 16; Mexican iconography and, 6, 12, 64, 74; muralists’ break from, 147–51; O’Gorman and, 113, 115, 125–26; Rivera and, 2, 21–22, 57, 58–59, 60, 76, 79–80, 87, 149; Stalin and, 43, 151 Solares, Eduardo, 87, 123 Soviet Union, 36–37, 52–53, 57, 60, 133, 180, 201 n. 49 spectacular museography, 51 Stalin, Josef, 38, 43, 57, 62, 201 n. 49 Stevens, Jacqueline, 82–83, 199 n. 71 strikes, 107, 119–22, 168–73 surrealism, 43, 148, 159, 163 Swann, Valeta, 148 Synthesis of Mexico (gallery), 141 Taller de Graphica Popular (tgp), 148, 158–59, 169 Tamayo, Rufino: art theory of, 64–65, 75, 148, 151, 172, 179, 190, 204 n. 133; Birth of Our Nationality, 67, 68–69, 70, 75; break from earlier mural tradition and, 63–64, 67–70, 72; commissions of, 56; Duality, 151, 152; Homage to the Indian Race, 60, 61, 67; institutional promotion of, 52, 63–64; Mexico Today, 67, 70, 75; mytho-­poetic figuration in, 60–63, 67–72, 76, 151–53, 166; National Anthropology Museum and, 126, 151–53; “Nationalism and the Pictorial Movement,” 150; Palace of Fine Arts work of, 25, 63–64, 67–70, 149, 152; Paz and, 27, 166–67; racial makeup of, 65–66, 72, 164, 167; Siqueiros’s attacks on, 62–63 “Tamayo in Mexican Painting” (Paz), 65, 166 Tehuanas, 9, 10, 60 telling technology, 77–80, 115, 121–26, 179 Tenochtitlán (ritual site), 113, 130–31, 138, 143–47, 152, 174, 182 Thoughts of the Nation (Morelos y Pavón), 101 Tibol, Raquel, 1 Tiempo, El, 102 Tlaloc monolith, 134, 139 Tlatelolco (massacre of), 14, 120, 129–30, 168–76, 181 Torture of Cuauhtémoc (Siqueiros), 53, 54, 169 tourism, 20–21, 34, 40, 50, 76, 114, 180, 208 n. 111 Tovar y Teresa, Rafael, 189

Index  233

“Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (Trotsky, Breton, and Rivera), 43, 64–65, 76 Trejo, Antonio, 148–49 Tropical America (Siqueiros), 109 Trotsky, Leon, 38–39, 43–45, 64–65, 76 truth, production of, 18, 77, 102, 121–26 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (exhibition), 51 Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters, and Sculptors, 39 United States: art criticism and, 62–63, 66–67, 73, 76, 179; as capitalist symbol, 36–37, 62–63, 112–13, 120– 21, 133, 180; Cold War and, 52–53, 132–33, 168; mural work in, 12, 34–35, 42–43, 45, 97, 169 Universal, El (publication), 89 Universal Gráfico, El (publication), 78 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam), 109, 114, 168–69, 171, 176, 186 University City (Ciudad Universitaria), 50, 108–9, 112, 116–18, 135, 138, 207 n. 80, 207 n. 84 Unomásuno (newspaper), 188 Vallejo, Demetrio, 119–20 Valley of Monte Albán (Trejo), 149 Valley of Teotihuacán, The (Moreno), 149 Vasconcelos, José, 1, 6–7, 12, 21, 132, 140–42, 166, 184, 187 Vaughn, Mary Kay, 15–16 Vázquez, Pedro Ramírez, 132–35, 138, 143–44, 148–49, 151, 158, 167, 177

Venice Biennial, 53, 63 Victim of Fascism (Siqueiros), 45–46, 48 Victims of War (Siqueiros), 45–46, 47 War of Independence (Mexican), 86 War of the Reform, 82 Westheim, Paul, 203 n. 115 Whitney Museum of American Art, 3 Wolfe, Bertram, 1, 38, 198 n. 44, 202 n. 69 women: fertility mythology and, 165–67, 174, 179; representations of mexicanidad and, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 49, 67, 71, 94–144–146, 163–67, 171, 174–76; reproductivity and, 37, 55, 70–72, 82–83, 129–30, 141, 165–67, 201 n. 42; revolution and, 106–7, 171–73. See also feminism; gender; race Work ’68 (exhibition), 171 World War II, 14, 43–45, 56–57, 64, 67, 120, 155, 158–59, 165 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 112 Wyman, Lance, 168, 169 Yudicé, George, 184 Zalce, Alfredo, 148–49 Zapatistas, 95–98 Zavala, Adriana, 11, 92 Zócalo, 168–69, 179 Zolov, Eric, 127–28, 133, 167, 212 n. 130

Mary K. Coffey is

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

an associate professor

Coffey, Mary K., 1968– How a revolutionary art became official culture : murals, museums, and the Mexican state / Mary K. Coffey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5020-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5037-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mural painting and decoration, Mexican—20th century. 2. Mural painting and decoration—Political aspects —Mexico. 3. Art and revolutions—Mexico. I. Title. ND2644.C64 2012 751.7′309720904—dc23 2011035896

of art history at Dartmouth College.

234   Index